The Dr. Hyman Show - What Is Hyper-Local Food? with Tobias Peggs

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Imagine getting the freshest basil, lettuce, and tomatoes for your favorite salad, right in your own neighborhood, no matter where you live or what time of year it is. With urban farming, this is the future we can all look forward to. It’s changing our food system for the better by reducing transportation (a leading cause of climate change) and allowing us to access fresher, more nutritious food. It’s also disrupting social issues by making fresh produce available in areas called food deserts, where convenience stores were previously the only place within many miles to shop.  This week on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m joined by Tobias Peggs to talk about the amazing impacts urban farming is already having and what we can expect to see as this practice grows. Tobias is co-founder and CEO of Square Roots, the Brooklyn-based urban farming company known for changing the way people think about growing local food and training the country’s future generations of farmers. Previously, he led Aviary, a mobile photo editing company as its CEO until its acquisition by Adobe, and was also CEO at OneRiot, a social media analytics company, acquired by Walmart. Tobias grew up in England and has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Cardiff University.  This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. I never let myself get into a food emergency. Instead, I always carry enough food with me when I’m on the go, for at least a full day. I order real, whole foods online from Thrive Market. Right now, Thrive is offering all Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a great deal: you will receive an extra 25% off your first purchase plus a free 30-day membership to Thrive. There’s no minimum amount to buy and no code at checkout. All you have to do is head over to http://thrivemarket.com/farmacy

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It's the love that the farmer puts in that makes the food taste great. Hi everybody. Now before we get started with this week's episode, I want to tell you about a company called Thrive Market. It's made it super easy for me to stay healthy even with my crazy travel schedule. In fact, I believe in them so much that I was one of the first investors over five years ago. All I had to hear was that they were basically creating a cross between Whole Foods, Amazon, and Costco, and I was all in because I wanted to get good food at a good price that was easy to get and delicious, and I knew I

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There's no minimum amount torive. There's no minimum amount to buy. There's no code to check out. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash pharmacy with an F, right? F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash pharmacy. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. I'm proud to have them as a sponsor for The Doctor's Pharmacy, and I'm also proud to be an investor in their company. For those of you who know me, you know that I love to cook and spend time in the kitchen. It's truly a revolutionary act, and in fact, it's the gateway to your best health. I tell my patients that to enjoy and appreciate cooking with real foods is the best

way to regain their health, which is why I'm coming out with a new cookbook called Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? My team and I put together this cookbook with over 100 delicious recipes for real food. I think you're going to really love it. And if you want to learn more about it, just go to foodthecookbook.com right now, sign up and get the free video instantly in your inbox of five steps to conscious cooking that I created to guide you through how to cook in your kitchen, all the secret tips I use. Or if you know that you really want to own the book, you can actually pre-order it right now. So when you pre-order and you show your proof of purchase, you're going to get really great bonuses, including

four cooking videos of me personally cooking some of the best recipes from the book. You'll get a recipe ebook with exclusive bonus recipes, and you're going to get so many special offers from my favorite merchants, things like Vitamix, Wayfair, Thrive Market, and lots more. I'm so excited for you to check out my new book, so just go to foodthecookbook.com. Thanks, and I'll see you in the kitchen. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today, this conversation I think

will matter because it's about food, how we grow it, where we grow it, and what it does to us, the environment, and pretty much everything that matters. So we have an extraordinary guest today, Tobias Peggs, who's an extraordinary man with a PhD in artificial intelligence who's an urban farmer. Makes perfect sense. intelligence who's an urban farmer and he's the founder with kemball musk uh of and he's the ceo of square roots which is a brooklyn-based urban farming company it's known for changing the way people think about growing local food and training the country's future generation of farmers because our farmers are getting old fast and we don't have young farmers. So I'm really interested in that. He's previously led a company called Aviary, which is a mobile photo editing company and was its CEO until it was bought by Adobe. Not bad.

Was also the CEO at One Riot, a social media analytics company that was acquired by Walmart, where he will tell us how that job helped him figure out what's wrong with grocery stores and food purchasing and farming and everything else. He grew up in England and the PhD he got was from Cardiff University. He's a Techstars mentor, competitive triathlete, a snowboarder, and admittedly eats far too much ramen. That is true. But you can only eat that much ramen because you run for 13 miles, bike for, I don't know, 50 miles, and swim for a mile and a half.

So unless you're out there doing that, I wouldn't eat as much ramen as Tobias. So welcome, Tobias. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. So this is really a great topic because we're learning more about the challenges of the agricultural system. We're learning about our conventional farming, which destroys the planet, which increases environmental degradation. It causes runoff in the water, some of the fertilizer that kills dead zones. It contributes to climate change.

It produces mostly commodity crops that is turned into junk food for humans, biofuels or animal feed. So we're kind of in a messy situation. And there's on the margins, all these exciting innovations that are happening around how to bring new thinking to solving the problem of how and where and what food we get. So Square Roots seems to be this extraordinary new company that has started up with a lot of backing from many really cool people who I saw on your board and as part of your team. And it's trying to disrupt our industrial food system, which generally produces low

quality food. It's not nutrient dense. It comes from every part of the planet. It's harmful to the health of us, to the planet, and leaves us pretty disconnected from the people who grow the food. You know, if you're a vegan and you get your produce from Chile or maybe from, you know, who knows where in China, you know, you probably with one flight of your asparagus from some other country, you'd have to be a vegan for five years of not eating meat to cover that carbon footprint so it's kind of a problem so tell us about square

roots how how do you see it changing the food system and how do you see it shifting the way we think about farming why i mean you've you've you know covered my entire pitch, right? Okay, all right. How scary the food system is. And that really led me to jump in and say, okay, we've got to do something about it. What Square Roots is in essence is an urban farming company, as you've said. We build farms right in the middle of the city. And so what that means is we're growing food

essentially in the same zip code as the end consumer we're also able to do that all year round thanks to the technology platform that we've built where we're building these farms indoors and what that means is that we can control the climates inside these farms and do that all year round right so let's say for example basil was your favorite herb yeah this is some basil right here perfect okay so the way that we smells really good the way the way that we would do that is we would say okay where in the world do they grow the best basil yeah right and the answer would be north of italy right okay and so we would literally look at the historical environmental patterns in the north of Italy and understand, okay, in the best basal growing season, when does the sun come up?

When does the sun go down? What is the temperature? What is the humidity? What is the CO2 level? experiment inside a box and basically drop it in the middle of Brooklyn and grow, you know, literally the world's best basil, but do that right in your backyard, right? Which means when you as the consumer get to eat that food, it was harvested like 10 hours ago, right? This morning, you know, as opposed to the industrial food system that you're talking about, where this food is being shipped across the planet and is taking days, weeks,

sometimes even months to get to us, which is crazy. I mean, if anybody's gone to their garden and picked an asparagus or had broccoli or a tomato, they know how different it tastes than when you get something that's been shipped across the country or across the world and the nutrient density of the food declines in direct proportion to how far it's gone how long it's sitting on a truck a plane or in the store and you're talking about getting not only local food but immediate food oh i don't know if there's a term for that no it it's crazy right when we first started studying uh food systems when we were putting square roots together three or four years ago i was horrified to find out that the average apple in a u.s supermarket has been traveling for nine months before it gets there not nine days not, not nine weeks, nine months. And to stop that apple

decomposing into a gray ball of mush, right? It's covered in wax, right? I'm sure you've gone to the supermarket and you buy an apple and the first thing you do is come home and wash it, right? You've got to get rid of that wax. And the reason for that is to stop the thing decomposing in the three quarters of a year that it's traveling, right? But to your point, during that time, all the nutrients inside are breaking down into sugars. So you think you're making a healthy choice. Maybe you're buying that apple for your kid for lunch tomorrow morning.

I mean, it's better than a Pop-Tart, but still. It's not as good as it could be. It's a waxy ball of sugar. When you say it like that, I'm feeling like. Right, and so then they join the dots between a country where we've got 30, 35% childhood right and when you say it like that i mean like right and so then they join the dots between you know a country where we've got 30 35 childhood obesity rates in most of our cities right who are all at the mercy of this industrial food system it is crazy yeah it's pretty it's pretty

big so what you're saying is you've created a essentially a very smart system of agriculture that incorporates a lot of data and knowledge and technology to grow just plants in a way that makes it optimal for them in those conditions. And I think it solves a lot of problems, right? So let's talk about the kind of problems it solves. One, talk about the impact, for example on the the nutritional quality of the food which you sort of just did right yeah so can you tell us more about what what really do you know about how good or different food that's that fresh and that local and grown in these conditions is absolutely well i mean i think that the first thing to say is that again as food travels those nutrients break down over time right and so a so a system like Square Roots, where we're growing food in the same zip code as that

retailer, as that end consumer, right? It means our food is traveling for less than 24 hours, right? And so all of the nutrients that are there when the food is picked, right? They're still there when you eat it, right? It's like, you know, one day, right? There's hardly any kind of degradation there. And then what we'll do to make sure that we understand how good that food is is lab test it against you know the best organic farmer's market food that you can buy in new york city and we're you know very very happy

at that nutrient quality so you're testing what in that in those tests you're testing like vitamin levels yeah nutrient levels and all sorts of stuff right so we want to make sure that we're at at the very least exactly at the very least as good as like the best food that you can buy at the organic farmers market in new york right however what we're then able to do is provide you as the consumer with that food all year round right 52 weeks a year because inside these farms in those controlled climates it doesn't matter what the weather is outdoors right you can have two foot of snow outdoors it can be the middle of February in New York City but indoors it's still the perfect conditions to grow that food right with those nutrient levels you know with all that goodness that's there and then still get that food to the consumer

within a day of harvest. Okay the other benefits are sort of disrupting some of the social challenges that face people when they try to eat good food. If you live in a food desert or something called food apartheid and you don't have access, you can literally put these shipping containers where you grow your food in any neighborhood and provide fresh local produce to that neighborhood in ways that were never accessible to them before. Yeah. I mean, if I think about what we've got in New York City, for example, our farms are built inside refurbished shipping containers, right? And that means that we can be very creative with existing city infrastructure in terms of thinking, where should we put a farm, right? If you have an empty warehouse, boom, I can back in 20 shipping

containers and turn that into a farm, right? In Brooklyn, an empty warehouse, boom, I can back in, you know, 20 shipping containers and turn that into a farm, right? In Brooklyn, for example, where our first pilot farm is, we literally have dropped these shipping containers on an underutilized parking lot outside an old Pfizer pharmaceutical factory and turned it into a farm, right? And what that means then is we're now distributing food, I think, to over 75 retailers across New York City. All of our retailers are within four miles of the farm. And that's mind-blowing, right? To think that the seven or eight million people that live in New York City can now have this hyper-locally grown food and have that all year round. Like, it's a game changer. Forget about local, but

hyper-local. Right, exactly. I mean, literally, you can jump on the j or the m right the subway line and come visit the farm right you're here and you know beautiful part of town our farm is like two miles away from your apartment amazing yeah so the the other benefit is is um you're you're raising up a new generation of farmers that is absolutely essential because in this country, the average age of farmers is 58 to 60. People are aging out of farming. There are really very few supports for young farmers to enter the marketplace. The land acquisition costs are so high.

The land has become financialized because corporations have bottled up because it's actually got more land value than agricultural value. So we're really in a situation where young farmers have a real barrier to entry in the market but you've created a whole program that's called next gen farmer training program that allows you to bring in people who want to be part of the solution and create a career out of it can you talk about yeah why you're doing that because you could just be selling herbs and vegetables and why would you know i mean you're you no, I mean, you're right. You know, at the beginning of the pod,

you were articulating the issues with the industrial food system, right? Chronic waste, terrible for the planet. You know, all of these things, pollution, diabetes, you know, 70% of our food has got pesticides in it. This is all horrific. And then this extra topic that doesn't get as much air time as it should is this

demographic time bomb that's about to go off right if the average age of a farmer today is 58 like who's going to grow the food in five or six years time when they retire it's like frightening and but you know to your point very very hard then for young people to start a career in farming you know and quite frankly if you're 22 23 like do you want to live in the middle of the country you know in a big you know farm exactly you know be surrounded by technology and you know like a you know have a have an opportunity to to you know really change the world right and so again when we were putting the business together you know we we realized first and foremost that if we're going to build an urban farming company,

we need farmers at the center of the system. Now, that might sound obvious, right? But there are a lot of entrepreneurs in this indoor farming space who are raising a ton of venture capital money to build robots and automation and AI and all these kind of buzzwords there's literally hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to this vertical farming basically to take the labor out of the system right because that's one of the most expensive inputs right and you know there's a lot of amazing technology on that our fundamental

thought though belief really was that it's the farmer that's at the center of the system, right? The person that's willing this plant to come to life that just makes it taste better, right? It's like when you're cooking, right? You put the love- Vitamin L. Vitamin L. Exactly. Exactly. And I have a PhD in AI, right? I've spent my whole life in data science and I found it very, very difficult to kind of rationalize that answer initially, but I just know that it's true, right? It's the love that the farmer puts in that makes the food taste great. So we had to figure out how do we provide a pathway for, you know,

young people to come in and learn how to be farmers, right? Provide that love in the system. But we also wanted to do that in a way that was creating a positive social impact on the world, right? How can we empower and educate and inspire and get more young people into this local food movement? They can spend, you know, 12 months with us, 24 months with us.

And then when they graduate and they leave Square Roots, you know, are they now inspired and do they have the tools and are they ready to set up their own local food companies right because the more of us working on this local food revolution the better right so that was kind of the genesis of okay what you know what what can we do here to bring more young people into the industry so great it's so it's so important because we we do have a crisis in farming and agriculture and we're trying to shift and there's so many movements there's regenerative agriculture that is really defining

a whole new way of thinking about growing food that restores the soil, that reduces carbon in the environment, that preserves water, that reduce chemical inputs and fertilizers. These are all really essential activities. And vertical farming is not going to solve our entire food problem, but it does fill a niche that is really important which is how do we how do we bring food into urban environments where more and more people are moving to across the globe where where there's less access in many areas for healthy food well and who's going to do that right so that that was the reason why we put this next jam farmer training program together right which is there aren't the millions of farmers who understand these systems, right,

who can make this happen. And so what the NextGen Farmer Program is, it's a 12-month program. Young people come and they work with us for a year. We basically surround them with technology and training and a team so that they go from, you know, perhaps zero experience growing plants

to become a really competent farmer within about four weeks. Amazing. The technology platform helps them do that. It kind of guides them through their day-to-day. Okay, buddy, you're in this farm today. You've got to harvest the basil. Here's how to do it. You run your farm through your smartphone.

Yeah, that's exactly right. They literally open an app on the phone and the system is kind of, you know, giving them instructions of what to do today, right? Yeah. At the end of that harvest day, then that food gets aggregated and packed and distributed all across New York. And it's done through bicycles, you basically. That's right, yeah. You know, the carbon footprint is basically whatever the guy who's driving the bike or the woman who's driving the bike ate, right? Yeah, it's so fun. We have these little electronic tricycles with climate-controlled modules on the front of them, right?

So the food literally goes from the farm straight into the climate-controlled bike and then, boom, recycle all around town and distribute the food that way. Like a different meaning of the word recycle. Right, right. Okay, so are you riding the bikes as part of your training to get around the city? Of course, yeah. I mean, to be fair, actually, we do do that. Every new employee that comes into Square Roots, they spend a month in the farm, right?

You've got to learn how to do this thing. And then for sure, they're on the bikes, they're in the stores doing demos. Like, you know, you've got to be able to kind of walk the walk, right? Yeah, so great. So let's talk about something that is also an important piece of the food story, which I think there's debate about how this approach impacts that. And that's climate change. It's really clear from emerging research that our food system is the number one source of climate change. 30% of greenhouse gases, right?

Yeah, 30%. But if you add in food waste, you add in all the transportation, you add in the whole, not just, you know, animal factory farms, but you add the whole value chain, some estimate that it's between 40% to 60%. Yeah, it's frightening. So it's frightening. It's bigger than the energy sector's contribution. So if we just completely stopped fossil fuel use today everybody switched to electric cars and had zero emissions we'd still

have catastrophic temperatures within two decades so the only solution is to reimagine agriculture and farming at scale and the idea of a carbon farm essentially is that soil is a big sink for carbon it's basically the plants draw carbon out of the environment and store it in the soil the microbes feed on it and it becomes this wonderful virtuous cycle and the hypothesis that some have is that if we do this at scale we can actually draw down carbon and it's the biggest carbon sink on the planet bigger than the rainforest right now soil on the planet contains three times as much carbon as the entire environment and the atmosphere. So with, with industrial farming, it's clearly a problem.

Regenerative farming is a promising solution. How does vertical farming, hydroponics, aeroponics, how does it all fit into that because there are energy inputs to the system, right? So you asked, you have a container and it's sitting in Brooklyn somewhere in a warehouse, but you have to have lights. It's driven by electricity. You have to have cooling and temperature control. And there's water use, but it's, I think, far less than traditional agriculture.

But so there's, how do you kind of reconcile that? What does the data show? I know that Cornell, they're doing some research to look at all these variables i don't know if anybody's really sort of figured it out but i i wonder is it got a positive a benefit or is it a negative benefit to the environment yeah and i think right no one no one has figured it out right and you're going to take maybe years right to figure out the exact impact of industrial farming, right? And then to do the comparison with indoor farming. With indoor farming, there's so, because it's a technology driven industry, right? There are so many efficiencies that happen every day, literally,

right? That by the time that five-year study, you know, that's commissioned and is finished, like it's kind of out of date, right? Because the industry has moved on. And that's a fantastic thing about indoor farming, often you could run off solar power wind power wind power right so we're opening a farm in michigan right now that is that is that is wind power right which is absolutely incredible and you have to think intuitively right that if you have an industrial farm where there's you know chemicals pesticides herbicides um you know that the the the you know farmers are kind of over planting to hedge against nature right think of all the resources that that takes and then you've got to distribute food maybe across the world um you know

the refrigeration costs along the way etc etc intuitively it's got to make sense to grow not not all I would never say this is a complete disruption. And you can't grow everything in there. Exactly. But I would say perishable, produce, your herbs, your leafy greens, some fruits. Let's start thinking about how to do this at scale, indoor, in the same zip code as the end consumer as soon as possible. Now, I'll tell you this, right? In the UK where I grew up, the intensive farming techniques that we're using, we're eroding the topsoil at such a rate that there is only about 50 years worth of harvests left in outdoor soil, right? If we continue the current practices.

If we continue the current practices, right? So you can sit here and pontificate you know for the next 10 years right to figure out okay which is you know you know is the carbon footprint of this better than this now we're 10 years closer to that 50 year kind of apocalyptic cliff right where we can't grow food outdoors so you have to and it's not just there i, before Obama left, he had people working on the soil issue, and they estimated in the United States, by the end of the century, we're running out of soil. We're done. So you've got to do something, right? So the way that we think about-

No soil, no food, no humans. We've got climate change. Exactly. Exactly. So when we think about resources, we think about space, we think about water, and we think about energy, right? So from a space perspective, we're growing using vertical walls, right? So we kind of take that two-dimensional field and we turn it on its end and kind of rack that field inside these boxes, right? So now we're growing food in three dimensions instead of two dimensions and that

means you get a lot more food from the same size footprint right so you know theoretically now we could think about saving you know like an apartment building versus a single levels that's exactly right right and so now let's think about okay well if we're sort of you know saving you know acres and acres and acres of farmland because we're growing indoors using this kind of very smart space system, you know, can we, what else now can we do with that outdoor land to do things like, you know, take carbon out of the air, right? So, you can work in collaboration, right, with the outdoor farmer, right? This isn't just, you know, the only part of the solution. Of course.

On the water side, these are hydroponic farms, so there's no soil. What that means is there's no water runoff, right, like you would have in an outdoor farm. So these are very, very efficient in terms of water use, right? Some estimates claim that hydroponic indoor farming uses about 90% less water than the equivalent outdoor farm, right? So that's a good thing. Which is important because we're running out of water too, not just soil. Completely. And then the third thing is energy, right? So yes, we do have

artificial lights inside these farms, right? It's the light that gives the plant the energy, right, that it then turns into biomass to grow, right? Not photosynthesis. Exactly, right? You need that. What we are able to do, though, is through studying photosynthesis, you begin to understand what spectrum of light the plant uses at certain points during its growth period. And then the artificial light, we're only pushing into the farm the exact spectrum that the plant needs, right? So often when you look at pictures of indoor farms, there that the plant needs, right? So often when you look at pictures

of indoor farms, there's pink lights everywhere, right? It's kind of red and blue lights because that's the spectrum. It looks like a disco. Right. It's like the Studio 54 of farming. We've been called many times. But the reason for that is one about energy efficiency, right? Which is if we're flooding this farm with white light, you then have all that spectrum either side of the red and blue that would just be wasted light, right? The plant doesn't use it, wasted light, wasted energy. Let's not do that. Let's hyper focus the spectrum of light to give the plant just what it needs, right? And then finally, as technologists, we're obviously making all of that more and more efficient every single day, right? If I'm an outdoor farmer, I can't suddenly look at the sun and

make it twice as efficient tomorrow to half my costs or double my yield. As an indoor farmer, I can look at those lights and make them twice as efficient over time and bring that positive impact to the whole model through technology over time. It seems like if you can add in the renewables to it you know like solar wind that you can actually you know make a real argument that it's 100 actually much better because it's because it is is more intensive and the then the question is you know where are we at in the affordability because you know when you start a new industry i mean i remember when i bought my first calculator which added subtract, subtracted, multiplied and divided. And that was it.

Right. It was $100 for that. And now you can get a smartphone that's a supercomputer for close to that. So what is the price challenges around this? Because it's more expensive than traditional, more expensive than organic. And actually, the calculator is a good analogy, right? Electric cars would be another good analogy, right? Ten years ago, electric cars, it made sense to, you know, make $100,000 sports cars, right? The Tesla Roadster, right?

That was where the technology was suited at that point in time. By building the Roadster, a company like Tesla is then able to invest and learn and push that technology and start building the Model S, family sedan available to more people. By selling the Model S, you're then able to invest and learn and get the technology better and build the three electric cars for everyone. We're getting closer and closer and closer. We're on that same path here with indoor farming. So today, we're able to grow leafy greens, herbs, even some small fruits at a very competitive price to say an organic farm, right? I think what's really, so kind of price parity is there, but admittedly price parity is still at the premium level, right? Right. if you're

on food stamps it's still a lot of long-term roadmap here has got to be you know not you know fancy basil for you know yuppies in new york right it's got to be very fancy right it's got to be you know real food for everyone right and that is what gets us out of bed every day you know as technologists as we think about the business model as we think about how do we bring more farmers into the system so there's more expertise and more people thinking about it right again the more of us working on this real food revolution this local food revolution the faster we're going to get to that that end point right but it's it's a journey yeah okay well let's talk about soil because you know this is something i'm very interested in as a doctor one of the most powerful things that i discovered

to heal people to treat disease to prevent disease are this rich array of chemicals in plants called phytochemicals or phytonutrients they're not vitamins and minerals um they're not protein fat carbs or fiber there's other category of stuff that you know you see in sort of you know the the berries have these proanthocyanidins which are powerful antioxidants or green tea has you know catechins or broccoli has glucosinolates and these are not part of their normal sort of quote nutritional value but it turns out that we've adapted and evolved with these compounds in plants to take over functions for our body like regulating inflammation antioxidant control our microbiome i mean there's all these things that are are regulated by these polyphenols and phytochemicals and you know i remember recently hearing about and reading about grass-fed beef.

And the quality of the meat and the quality of the, even the, quote, phytonutrients and the antioxidants of the meat was controlled by what the meat was eating. Yeah. In a sense, there were multiple different types of forage grasses and plants. And they all have different properties. They all extract different nutrients from the soil. they all have different phytochemicals and they have a huge impact on the end product which is the food that's eating it so without soil i mean we know a lot about soil but there's a lot we don't know i mean they're in a thimble

full of soil there's more microbial life than all humans that ever lived on the planet in the history of humans right so we know nothing yeah close to nothing yeah and and and you know there's things that we do know right we know basic things what plants needs we know npk we know the the vitamins and minerals they need we know we know all this but the way the soil works is it it allows if it's organic matter and so it allows the plants to extract all this cool stuff from the soil works is it allows, if it's organic matter, it allows the plants to extract all this cool stuff from the soil to make its powerful chemicals. And also, plants grown in different environments are different. For example, an organic plant has far more phytochemicals and nutrients

than a conventionally grown plant. And a wild plant has even far more so a wild blueberry versus an organic blueberry versus a conventional blueberry profoundly different and does that depend on where in the you know in the planet those things are going of course of course of course of course it depends on what the soil so the soil matters so much in the food so the question i have for you then is, if that's true, when you remove soil from the equation, like what gives? That's right.

Do we know? No, no, no. It's a great question, right? But if you think about kind of what's in that soil and how accessible that is to the plant, right? Immediately, it kind of isn't, right? And the rain is a very important factor here, right? And kind of dissolves those things

and makes that accessible to the plant. Well, it's actually the microbial life in the soil that makes those nutrients accessible. Exactly, right? Because our nutrient content has gone down 40 to 50% in a lot of foods that we've grown because of the lack of organic matter in the soil. Yep, yep. So huge problems that are getting worse. Right. And then lots of variations all across the planet. Right. So I think one of the major advantages with controlled climate agriculture is that we're controlled. Right. So we can study those plants. Right. Those wild blueberries. Right. That you were talking about okay what what's in there and then how can we um you know inject input those elements right into the system to make sure that the plants are the grown indoors are also absorbing those things at exactly the right doses that we need right and so you'll get you'll get parity but also parity with you know the best product that there is. You kind of remove the variability from it. So we'll certainly work today.

We're putting microbes into the growing systems. As I said, we're kind of lab testing every single month the quality of the product. Of course, we're learning more and more and more about what that plant is taking out of the soil. But again, with indoor, with controlled climate, you kind of micro dose you know those those elements into the system and make sure that your plant is taking those things up wait wait so you just said you're adding microbes into the environment correct so see my my probably illogical um ill-informed vision is that you've got these walls of plants with the roots somehow hanging off in the space would you spray stuff onto them and water and vitamins and minerals and it's like this yeah sort of super high-tech you know the jetson version of like you know farming

you should come over and visit it isn't quite jetson but you know it's a farm right jetsons meets studio 54 maybe and no but it's a farm right and there are living there are living plants in there and in in the growing medium right where the plants are suspended that's where you've got those microbes so you add microbes correct right so they're all around why are you adding the microbes well for exactly those reasons that you're saying right how does that then help the plant absorb um you know that that that goodness right that you end up you know kind of tasting right okay so if there's like literally trillions of microbes in like a handful of soil how do you know which ones yeah have them happen we don't even know what they are right yeah that's true and you know that's why

we hire you know agronomists very hire, you know, agronomists, very experienced farmers, you know. And again, a lot of it can be… Maybe another PhD, artificial intelligence and agronomy. That's exactly right. But ultimately, you can also taste that goodness as well. Right? And I think, you know, when hydroponic food kind of first started coming to market 10 years ago. That's good basil.

There you go. Right. So when hydroponic food first started coming to market 10 years ago, you were tasting it. It's kind of limp. It doesn't really have that taste. You know, and because it was version 1.0, right, of what was needed, right? We're now on version, you know, 10, 12, you know, 15, right? And so you're getting that crunch, that taste, that smell, all of those needed, right? We're now on version, you know, 10, 12, you know, 15, right? And so you're getting that crunch, that taste, that smell,

all of those things, right? And this is kind of implying that the, you know, the quality of the food that's coming is, you know, on par with what you would have, like, from the, you know, the best farmland in the world. Yeah, so you have, like, Dan Barber and Kimball Musk having these sort of debates about whether or not we need the soil versus whether we can do it through technology and hydroponics yeah i mean listen i i'll be honest with you i don't think that's the right

debate i don't i really it's not either or we're on the same side absolutely right we're on the same side which means let's have local farms let's get people much more connected with their local farmer with the person that's growing the food right let's get them to understand the value of that food let's grow food locally see the face that feeds you now if totally now we talk at square roots a lot about um appropriate systems right if you're upstate you know next to a village it's got a great composting program, like the appropriate system may well be, you know, an outdoor no-till organic farm, you know, you get that compost, great. Try doing that in the middle of Brooklyn. Yeah. Right? It's impossible.

And so the appropriate system there may well be an indoor hydroponic farm, right? The point is the end product is local food that's getting people connected to the farmer. That's a good thing. Our common enemy, right, whether you're Dan Barber or Kimball Musk, right, the common enemy is the industrial food system that's shipping in food from who knows where, doesn't taste of anything, that's got low nutrients, is, you know, high calorie, is terrible for us, right? That's the common common enemy so i'd much rather we focused on how you know we and the and the you know the local farmers the organic farmers the regenerative farmers like how do we work together and recreate a new food system that's based on local sustainable food that's great so what kind of stuff can you grow you're growing basil mint you're growing lettuce

like what do you what what are the limits of what you can grow yeah can you grow rutabag stuff can you grow? You're growing basil, mint, you're growing lettuce. What are the limits of what you can grow? Yeah. Can you grow rutabagas? Can you grow like what? So the question today isn't really one of capability, right? It's one of economics. So in the farm, in the last kind of six months, right, we've grown turnips.

We've grown eggplants. We've grown strawberries six months, right? We've grown turnips, we've grown eggplants, we've grown strawberries, tomatoes, right? We had a chili eating competition in the office last month, right? With some habaneros that the farmers grew. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. But if you think about photosynthesis, right? What's happening is the plant is taking energy from a light source and then converting that into biomass, right? So something like herbs and leafy greens, right? Not too much biomass, doesn't need that much energy. So you can get that product to market at a very competitive price today, right? If you grow more and more biomass,

right? Heavier vegetables, a turnip, right? It's going to take more energy. And so maybe today, it's just not economically viable to get that to market. But again, as technologists, you can make that system more efficient with time. So it's literally just a roadmap of heavier and heavier vegetables. I think for us, herbs, leafy greens today small uh fruiting crops are next right we've got um you know some really beautifully tasting strawberries that we can get at the farm it wouldn't surprise me if those were in market like within a year because there'll be a competitive price the question i think really though is you know so theoretically so expensive to get this

started you've got you know to rehab the shipping containers you've got all the technology involved you've got all the light i mean the energy control the right but it's a lot of inputs then you know you have articulated the issues that we're facing so well you know if it's gonna cost a couple of million dollars to get another indoor farming business up and running so that they can start to tackle that right versus the cataclysmic issues that we've got facing us 20 30 years from now like these are these are easy bets to make at this point i i would argue right yeah yeah that's true i think we need solutions across the food system and i think bringing in urban farming bringing in you know urban indoor agriculture uh is is definitely catching a lot of people's attention.

And I think like any early industry and startup, it's, you know, it's going to take time for it to mature, for us to learn all the facts, for us to be able to sort of figure out if this is affordable, scalable. But it sounds like it provides a solution in a place where, you know, there often isn't access to good food. And the other thing is that it actually gets people to be aware of the challenges with our food system. So by doing something different, you're actually highlighting the flaws in our current system that you should be getting your lettuce from California as opposed to Brooklyn. Right.

We're doing something different and doing it right in the middle of the city so that people can literally come and see. So we'll do open house farm tours. And we've got one every month. Every four weeks, we'll do this open house farm tour. We'll get hundreds of people showing up on these farm tours to stand in a parking lot in the middle of Brooklyn. And then when we open the doors to these farms, right, you can smell that basil and see the

farmer at work. And it's just magic. You know, the best thing that I love about these farm tours is the emails that I get the next day, you know, from a parent, right? You know, I brought, you know, little Johnny to the farm tour. He would never eat vegetables, but now he wants to grow up and be an urban farmer right because you know it's so kind of relatable and visceral it's this like amazing experience what that's doing is getting people connected to their food again and that's that's a wonderful thing it's so great so this has just been so

fascinating and i think that you know the the future is going to look different than it does today for food. It has to because we're not in a sustainable pattern of growing food. Like you said, we're maybe have 50 to 100 harvests left. We're running out of water. Climate change is driving so much crisis around the world. It's driven by our food system and the way we grow food. The policies that we have in agriculture don't support um the kind of agriculture that will solve the problems how how are you finding from a support point of view are you getting any support from the usda

or the government or the uh department of agriculture to actually facilitate what you're doing yeah it's um it it's an interesting one, right? And I'll tread somewhat carefully, right? You don't have to, it's fine. I think certainly every time that we've talked to the USDA about what we're doing, they're very, very keen to figure out ways to support especially the young farmer training program. They, of course course like everybody else recognizes the need to bring young people you know into the

industry and create pathways to do that so you know i i think that's good i would say that um you know there's an issue with um hydroponic growers finding it very difficult to certify as organic for for example. You know, our farm uses zero pesticides. Zero, right? It's a controlled environment. It's the cleanest food you're ever going to eat in your life. We cannot certify as organic.

What is the fertilizer you use? Oh, so, yeah, we use MPK, right? And we source in the same way as, you know, as any other farmer would, right? So you're using big, fertilizer companies products like well i mean we we actually don't right so we'll work very very closely with uh kind of more small batch you know providers where we understand kind of where their nutrients are coming from and like we're very very uh sort of keen to make sure we understand their supply chain so we feel good about where those things and also the nitrogen is not running off into the rivers and lakes and dead zones that's exactly right it's a completely it's not destroying the soil because you don't have soil

well but that that that's back to this organic point right in order to certify as an organic farmer you have to show how you are repairing the soil obviously we have a problem there right because we do not have any soil you could say we're not depleting the soil. Obviously, we have a problem there, right? Because we do not have any soil. You could say we're not depleting the soil. Well, that's right. We're not using soil. So I think, you know, a lot of hydroponic growers, when we're, you know, going to market and trying to, you know, make the consumer sort of understand, you know, why this product, you know, is a good high quality product, then we're able to say this is grown locally

or hyper locally. It's very difficult to say that it's grown organically yeah that's a challenge not not that i think today actually that would matter much in terms of marketing right because i think the discerning consumer now understands that yeah i can get my organic food but i understand that organic farmers can use pesticides yeah but there's no weeds on your plate exactly right or i can get organic food but it's shipped in from you know south america or whatever it is right so it's pesticide free gmo free herbicide free with no chemicals other than fertilizer right sounds pretty good it tastes good and you know ultimately i think that's that's the key that is the key. That is the key. If the food tastes good,

right? Yeah. Straight off the farm, right? That is the best food that you can have. So this seems like a really cool idea. You know, you're in Brooklyn,

but you're also thinking about how to bring this to the globe, not just here in Brooklyn. And you partnered with one of the biggest food distribution companies in America, in North America, called Gordon Food Services. So how do you see that playing out? Yeah, this is potentially pretty big, actually. So Gordon Food Service, huge food distribution company, they're servicing tens of thousands of customers all across the,

you know, the country, you know, they'll service, you know, restaurants, right? And their customers, those restaurateurs want local food, right? Because their customers, the people eating at the restaurants want local food, right? This is the way people understand this is what we want. So demand is increasing for this stuff. And it's very, very hard to source local food at a national scale and do that consistently all year round. This is where indoor farming like ours can be a solution. So we've partnered with Gordon Food Service, who are an incredibly mission-driven company. They understand the responsibility that they have as a food company at that scale to also do things that help us move towards a sustainable, healthier food system. They've partnered with us to build Square Roots Farms on every single one of their distribution

centers across North America. So not only now will we be growing local food and plugging right into their distribution system and getting local food to all of their customers year round, but it also means then that they're supporting the farmer training program that we have. So now instead of training tens of people a year from our one farm in Brooklyn, we're now training hundreds, maybe thousands of young people a year across all these farms, across Gordon Foods distribution network, right? And now this thing becomes a movement, right? This is how we get thousands of young people into the local food system. And they can earn a good living doing this? Yeah, yeah. So what would an indoor urban farmer make?

Oh, sure. So the next generation farmer training program that we have, think of it as a 40-hour week, right? You spend maybe 25 hours a week farming, five hours a week learning about sales and marketing and distribution, getting into the stores, talking with customers, trying to understand what the community is saying about local food. And then we also provide 10 hours a week of structured programming where we're teaching the farmers plant science, entrepreneurship frameworks, and then finally community building.

So the whole idea is it's kind of like a hands-on MBA to become a local food entrepreneur, right? When you graduate from Square Roots, you know how to farm, you know about plant science. And if you track these farmers- Oh, it's amazing. And by the way, and you get paid, right? You get paid in Brooklyn, I think something like $40,000 a year to do that and healthcare, right? This is unbelievable because most of the other options for young people wanting to learn how to be farmers is go volunteer on an organic farm and don't get paid, right? Yeah, right. Don't get paid, right.

So this is like a really good proposition, we think. Obviously, we get highly motivated people in our farms farming. That's kind of like the engine of our system. So it's a very fair value exchange, I think. But it's a really kind of exciting opportunity for young people to come and make their first step in this industry. And yes, to your point, what happens to these folks once they've graduated and leave Square Roots? So we have folks who've gone and set up mushroom farms in Long Island and now selling mushrooms to all the restaurants out there. People who have set up urban farms in New York City, rooftop farms, folks that we've been able

to place in other urban farming companies all across the country. And then of course, you know, a square root scales, we've got plenty of opportunity for people to come and work with us. So people can make a good living. Oh yeah. And also it's an acceleration into a career, right? A lifetime of this new urban farming industry. Amazing. All right. So if you could change what's going on in agriculture today other than more urban farming or even including that what would be the biggest leverage you would push to actually change the system yeah i mean you know you look at 2050 right and you've

got 10 billion people that you got to feed feed. And, you know, clearly the current methods of food production are not going to get there, right? In a sustainable way. So we need to grow, you know, arguably more food, certainly in a different way. And that's one half of the equation, right? The other half of the equation, this is the things that, you know i i cheer on from the sidelines i you know watch people do amazing things there is around the topic of food waste right so we're growing food let's not waste food we actually you're right we actually have enough food for over 10 billion people right now but we waste 40 of it right you know farmers over plant

right to edge against nature. So a ton of food's left in the soil. Yeah, you know, someone quoted that it's literally the amount of food that could be grown in the entire land mass of China is thrown out every year. That's right, right? And where does it get thrown out, right? Transport, right? You know, if food is being shipped thousands of miles in a truck and it's bouncing up and

down, you know, half of it is, you know, bruised and rotten by the time it gets to the retailer right the retailer then has got kind of ridiculous aesthetic um standards right where the food's got to look perfect if it's going to go on the shelf so much food is rejected it's ugly and then the consumer over consumes right we buy way too much food and then throw it away at the end of the month it's true i left a bunch of produce in my fridge up in the massachusetts do you compost i do so that's it's my it's my it's my uh way i feel i can justify the leftovers or even the scraps because even when you're making stuff i mean you can make food out of scraps like dan barber but you know i actually had a compost pile for 40 years right but that that's amazing because i read i read uh soil and health by your countryman sir albert howard right which is the father amazing because i read i read uh soil and health by your countryman

sir albert howard right which is the father of organic agriculture and i really began to understand this cycle of soil and health but how easy do you think that is for most people like do you compost in new york well actually there is a uh in union square park in the farmer's market you can bring your scraps and yes and they actually have kitchen composters you can buy right you can actually make compost in your kitchen or backyard. But how can we do that to make it convenient and easy for 10 billion people? Well, you know, San Francisco is mandated composting. That's right.

In France, you're not allowed to actually throw out vegetables if you're a supplier, restaurant, or grocery store. You get fined. You can go to jail if you throw out your food waste. And they've dramatically reduced it. That's right. So there's enormous amount of efficiency to be kind of captured all along that supply chain to reduce that waste number.

If we waste 40% of food today, let's not do that. But I bet you your stuff doesn't get wasted because you don't have waste on the farm. Well, a number of things. Exactly. So A, we grow on demand. This thing is so controlled. We're literally sort of controlling the morphology of the plant right so with one cup boom it fits exactly into the packaging right so there's no trimming then of course that supply chain you know like we're cycling to the

retail store you know that takes less than a day right so there's no wastage along the way the food then when it's on the shelf is super fresh right it's going to last three times longer than industrial food and then likewise for the consumer right they take it home they put in the shell put it in their refrigerator whatever again it lasts a long time so there's no very little waste you know all along all along that chain actually all right amazing well um this has been an extraordinary interview you you've kind of enlightened me about the benefits of vertical farming and hydroponics and dispelled

some myths and we've discussed some of the challenges that are unknown that we have to figure out sure uh and and this isn't the solution for everything but it is a key part of the transformation of american agriculture urban, training new generations of farmers. It's just, it's a tremendous effort. And thank you for taking your PhD in artificial intelligence and applying it to making the world a better place because it could be bad with artificial intelligence. It's a completely different topic.

Yeah, fantastic. So thanks for joining us, Tobias Peggs on The Doctor's Pharmacy. You've been listening to The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share this with your friends and family on social media or wherever you like to share stuff. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

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