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Matt and Sean talk to Nona Yehia (Vertical Harvest) about vertical farming, technological “growth”, and the future of food.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why This Vertical Farm is 500x More Efficient Than Farming https://youtu.be/8sOEB2m0m9Y?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk to Nona Yehia (Vertical Harvest) about vertical farming, technological “growth”, and the future of food.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why This Vertical Farm is 500x More Efficient Than Farming https://youtu.be/8sOEB2m0m9Y?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: Today on Still to be Determined. We're talking about a future so bright we have to wear shower caps. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And here on Still to be Determined, we like to revisit Matt's videos. Take a look at your comments there. Take a look at your comments here. Take a look and just chat about whatever comes up. But today, something a little different. We have a deeper dive conversation with Nona Yehia, who is the CEO of Vertical Harvest, the subject of Matt's most recent video. So we're looking forward to talking directly to her. On now to our conversation with Nona. First of all, Nona, thank you so much for being here. It's terrific to meet you. And I understand that, that this all started because of a potluck. You had a potluck at dinner.
Nona Yehia: I believe it was that you have false information. Sean. It was a, it was a bachelorette party. It was a bachelorette party.
Sean Ferrell: That's even better. That's, that's even better.
Nona Yehia: At a hot springs. Yeah, yeah. So even better. A bunch of ladies getting together to take advantage of some sulfur.
Sean Ferrell: That's wonderful.
Matt Ferrell: How do you connect a bachelorette party to Vertical Harvest? Like how do you connect those two?
Nona Yehia: Well, let me, let me go back before the bachelorette party. Right. So as I think you both know, I never set out to be a vertical farmer. This is, this is a trade that found me and I think like every good entrepreneur who, entrepreneurship, anyone who's been through it, you know, it's not for the faint of heart and you have to have something that drives you, right. Or else you're just like, okay, this isn't worth it. And for me it's very personal. I have a brother with disabilities. From a very early age, I understood that community wasn't set up to support him the way that it was set up to support me. I got, seemed to get all the advantages and he still had to work to find his way through and to be able to make him work for community. So I became and an advocate before I even understood what the word meant. And that drove me to become an architect because design became my, my tool, my medium for change. And with that I became really focused on infrastructure and community. Like curb cuts stairs, how infrastructure supported people, but more importantly, where it left people behind. And I think throughout my 30 year career, you know, journey as being an architect, I, I was really focused on key success factors. For communities. And food seemed to be at the core of every single one of them. And, you know, when food seems to be the strongest link to human and environmental health. And so I. I was always looking for a way that I could integrate food into my architectural career. So I've lived in Michigan, I've lived in New York. I've spent the last 23 years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And Jackson Hole is a pretty unique spot because it's just filled with risk takers. Right. People who want to push the boundaries. In 2008, if you could put yourself back to where we were, then, there wasn't much work for architects.
And so I had been working internationally and those projects went on hold. And I said, well, what do I want to do? I said, I really want to double down on this idea of community. So I started designing residential scale greenhouses that could last the Wyoming winter for my friends to grow food, because my friends were a bunch of foodies. And then I had worked with the town on a couple of projects, notably the local bouldering project, Bouldering park, and had designed it for them. So I had a lot of connections with the town. And so I was at a bachelorette party and I met our first co founder here, Penny McBride, and she was working to see if a greenhouse could exist in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And she had heard about my work and she said, do you want to help? And I was like, yeah, I do. That would be really fun. And so she didn't have a site, she didn't have a scale, but she then had an architect. And so we started on the journey that has taken me, you know, to a much different place than where I thought we would end up.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, that sounds like. I mean, that. That one answer to that question, you've touched off on about half of our bullet points of things we wanted to talk to you about. So you. I'm curious right out of the gate, I wondered what it was like as you started to approach municipalities about this idea and saying, here's what we want to do. How many of them slowly rolled their chairs out of the office just to pull themselves out of the meeting as quietly as possible. How many of them really understood what you were trying to get to? What was the initial response like back in 2008, 2009, 2010?
Nona Yehia: Well, okay, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I mean, we didn't open our doors until 2016. So it was six years of what? Oh, wait, who are you? Are you a farmer? You look like an architect. You kind of talk like an architect and wait what, you want to solve other problems as well? You don't want to just grow food. You want to employ people who have historic barriers to entry to employment. Because, you know, we met our third co founder, Caroline Crofteste, during this process, and she said to Penny and I, hey, if you both ever get this farm off the ground, would you employ my people? She was an employment facilitator for people with disabilities. And obviously, I was all in. So we were innovating, Sean, at a lot of different levels, sounds like. But from the beginning, you know, there were a lot of community members that saw our vision very clearly. And so we started to amass a really dedicated group of, you know, people who saw very clearly how this could support our community. And actually, you know, I think one of the best stories of Vertical Harvest, and it's. It's been this way ever since, you know, when we kind of got some traction and there was a grant that we could capitalize half the building cost with a public entity called the Wyoming Business Council that was in place to develop economic development. We went down that process. And at the time, it was when the Tea Party was around, right? And I'll never forget, the head of the Tea Party at this time came to me and he was like, Nona, I'm going to kill your project. Like, your numbers don't make any sense. It's public money. You're parading around like a nonprofit. Like, this is done. You're not going to go any further. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, let's. Let's talk. And so I invited him to lunch. We went to lunch for the next, I think, three to four months every week.
And I'll, you know, never forget. I was exhausted. The last lunch that we had, he looked at me and he said, you know, no, no. What happens when you bat down all the no's? And I was like, I'm not in the mood for riddles. Just tell me what you are thinking. And he said, turn it into yes. Turn it into a yes. And he became our biggest advocate. And so we won by one vote with the Wyoming Business Council. But after that, you know, I would say that the chairs all started coming towards us when we got the farm up and running, you know, in 2016, 2017, our story punched a national weight. And that was a lot for us because we had municipalities calling out of the blue saying, we want your model of not only growing food, but creating jobs. Come and help us. And I was like, well, the model's not ready. We have to make sure. That this is scalable, that this is profitable. All of the questions that people have about this type of farming, we need to make sure that we can answer that before we scale. And I'm really glad we did. I think that, like any innovation, people kind of back themselves out of a room at first, but then when you start proving it, they get closer. We're on a second cycle of that with the scale that we've introduced in Maine and what. What you so beautifully covered in the latest piece. And.
And I think that we're very excited to prove this model out at the scale that it exists in Maine.
Matt Ferrell: When I was in the facility in Maine, one of the things I was impressed by was the disability angle was something everybody seemed very proud of.
Nona Yehia: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And everything that I was seeing, it was like, oh, this thing where you put the seating machine in, you can articulate this up and down. So you could be in a wheelchair.
Sean Ferrell: You could be.
Matt Ferrell: It doesn't matter. Anybody could access everything in the facility. I didn't touch on that in detail in the video, but it was something that really stood out at me. All the thought and care that went into the entire facility as a whole. And I'm assuming that comes right back to what you talked about at the beginning.
Nona Yehia: I think having a real why behind the work. Right. We've all seen technology and this innovative way of producing food have a real impact on people's lives. Not only the people that work there, but the people that are in the community in which it serves. Right. There's a real pride in the way that we've solved a real problem. You know, no one. And what I used to say. I'm not sure anymore, but I used to say that nobody can argue with food and jobs. And that's what we were innovating. So that if we are going to reconnect the farm to the urban center, and that's what I set out to do, was create a new type of civic infrastructure like a hospital or at a community center or an airport. But it's a farm that would be located in the heart of a city. And if we are going to reconnect the farm to cities, feed people where they are, what kind of jobs are we going to create? What does this look like? And, you know, there's as. As across the nation right now, we're seeing a labor shortage that is really heightened in the agricultural community. We see. We see stories about that every day now. And that the average age of a farmer in the United States is 58. Well, there's also a segment, a population that has 80% unemployment, that wants to work, that can work, and that just needs specific training in order to work. But they, you know, are a labor source that any industry should be looking at, and that's people with disabilities. And I think my experience and Caroline's experience facilitated that. But it's good for the business and it's really just, it's just problem solving and connecting dots. So it is a feel good thing. And I think, you know, the culture that we built around it is pretty magic.
And you know, any, any company uses the cliche that culture eats strategy for lunch or breakfast or whatever, but we, we live that on a daily basis and the culture is really strong. And I would say that through the ups and downs, our employees with disabilities are the first one to work every day, ready to fight the good fight, and they're very proud of the work that they do. And, and, and people that don't identify with disabilities are very proud to work alongside them. So that's been the pride of my career. No matter what happens in the future, I know that we made true change.
Sean Ferrell: It sounds like you find yourself at the center of a Venn diagram with a lot of overlapping communities where you've got the food source need, you've got the urban center need, you've got the disability community need, you've got the wider public need of just being able to find, produce and that kind of thing. Do you think that, that when it, when you boil it down to that, is that the kind of model that an entrepreneur should be leaning into as far as, like, you're not out there in one community solving one problem. Where do you interface with all the different communities around you and how do they overlap and how do you pin yourself in the middle of that? It sounds very much to me like you accidentally stumbled on that, but it seems, it seems like a smart idea.
Nona Yehia: Well, I think throughout the whole thing and Matt, I think in your tour of the farm, you saw that we do this. Everything's about kind of a portfolio approach, right. That you are able to root yourself in multiple different arenas. Right. So for the product or let's just talk about who we sell to. We don't just sell to retail, we don't just sell to food service, but to the anchor institutions, the schools, the hospitals. Right. That in the pandemic, if we had just sold to culinary, well, then we would have had a problem. Right? So you can shift and really be nimble according to the market conditions. But from the very beginning, I think we set out to develop a company that, yes, addressed climate resilience, but that it could also address other key issues that people care about. Public health, social resiliency in terms of economics, and economic resiliency in terms of our communities. And so when you put all those drivers together, what you do is you create a company that people care about. And what are brands really? They're movements. Right. You look at the brands that are most successful, it's because people want to be aligned with them. They want to be a part of it, and it means something to them, to their family, to their community, to their region. And I think we saw the possibility of that at the very beginning, and I think that that possibility is really not. We have still, our dance card is full. Once Maine proves out the model, we are off to the races in terms of replication. And I hope that that is where this all ends, because communities across the board are very excited to be aligned with what we've built. So I would completely agree with that.
Sean Ferrell: Without naming names, I'm not going to ask you to forecast where you'll be in five years, but without naming names, let's say a year from now, Maine has proven the model. How many different places do you anticipate? You're very close to being able to say, yep, we're going in there and we're going to start doing it there as well.
Nona Yehia: You said five years from now, like
Sean Ferrell: maybe a year from now. Yeah.
Nona Yehia: So a year from now, we'll be talking to two other communities about developing the model, and five years from now, we'll have two more farms in operation with another on the way.
Sean Ferrell: That's wonderful.
Matt Ferrell: Okay.
Nona Yehia: Yeah, we want to. We would like to build a family of 10. So that's. That's the network that we'd start with. Of course, if we are able to find the right partners, the right tools for scale, we would like to do more. But right now, I think where this industry has been, all of us have learned, and I think we knew from the beginning, let's not overreach, and let's really put one foot in front of the other. Let's make sure that this model is capable of. And then we make the promises. And I think that that is really critical to understand.
Matt Ferrell: Well, yeah, I think that actually dovetails nicely into kind of like the industry question, because the vertical farming industry has been kind of like bankruptcies all over the place. Big players, like plenty went bankrupt. There's all these bankruptcies that have happened over the past two or three years. And yet you you guys are still standing and you're still pushing forward. What is it about the way their approaches didn't work versus what you guys are doing that's making it slightly different?
Nona Yehia: Yeah, I love talking about this. Number one, I want to say that I'm very grateful for the first generation of vertical farms. They took the big leaps. They really rooted this idea in the public psyche, and it's a tool that we need very much right now. So I'm very grateful for the risks that these companies took, and I'm always rooting for them to come out of bankruptcy, to restructure, you know, all of the ways that we can all go down this corporate journey together. I think from the very beginning, where there were a few missteps is that it's probably threefold. Number one, they identified as the wrong kind of company. This is farming. This is about operation. This is about unit economics. This is about how can you push margins? What are the products that push margins? We were never going to be able to compete with traditional agriculture, but what we could do is create a counterpart to traditional agriculture that enhances the resiliency of the way that we distribute food in our country today. And that a more regional approach when you're not focused on that operation. What. What kind of company are you building? And I think that a lot of the companies at the beginning thought that they were technology companies, and so they had the valuations of technology companies. If you think about where we were 10 years ago, eight years ago, money was basically free, right? There was a lot of VC who was looking to back the next back big thing. And so put technology and human kind and, you know, big valuations together. Well, you, you have a. A great prospect. And I think that when the companies had to come back to the table for money because they had tried to reinvent the wheel or possibly reinvent a new wheel, that that source wasn't there anymore.
And I think for us, I entered this, as you both know now, as an architect, and I knew I could design a beautiful building, but could it be a farm? So I looked at where there was expertise and, and Matt, you talked about it, that in a country the size of Maryland, the Netherlands is the largest exporter, second largest exporter of food behind the United States. They have been growing hydroponically under glass, horizontally for 30 years. So all of that R&D was there. And as an architect, I just took that. And with great engineers and what I lovingly called the Dutch mafia, we figured out how to adapt it to a vertical format, right and, and with the purpose of feeding cities. Right. So we weren't on the outskirts of cities like some of our colleagues and competitors and nameless, faceless warehouses trying busily to build the robots that would completely automate a farm. We were saying, how do we become the best operators? How do we grow as much food as possible? How do we bring the product directly to the people that need it? How do we not only understand how to grow and operate, but the market is so important. Who is the customer? What are they going to need in terms of how can we supplement what they already get from traditional agriculture? And I think we always asked ourselves those hard questions because I came in too late, I didn't have access to VC, right? And I'm grateful for that now because I think that my colleagues and competitors made big mistakes with big farms and big money. I made big mistakes because it's new and there was no playbook. But I made it in a small farm. Our farm in Wyoming that we've run for 10 years is a 20th of the size of the one in Maine. And we made it with a relatively small amount of money. And we learned from our own mistakes and we learned from the mess, the lessons from the industry.
And we also learned in this new context of what is important to investors, an investment, and how do we create an enduring business? And I'm not saying we're out of the woods, far from it. The markets keep shifting and turning, and I don't know if anyone is right now, but I think that we have built a business that is based on data and is based on 10 years of experience and really understanding what is our product, who is our customer, what are the systems that work, and finally, how do we build a workforce around it that is resilient? I think that's why we're still here. I think that a lot of the bankruptcies and restructures have had some good results. There's one farm in particular, Aero Farms, who really focused on microgreens. It's a high margin product. That's where we were focused from the very beginning. It was, it's more of a national distribution instead of a regional one. But I think that, you know, there a lot of mistakes were made, but now that we're on the second wave of what this can look like, we've learned from where the first wave has ended up.
And like I said, I think it's a good place to be, but it's still not a secure place to be.
Matt Ferrell: The Dutch Mafia sounds like a Netflix show I'd want to watch. Yeah.
Nona Yehia: Well, I owe such a debt of gratitude to our partners in the Netherlands. You know, I think that that was huge. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We didn't need to invent a new wheel. We knew the wheel and we just had to put the pieces of the wheel in a, you know, together in a way that made sense. And, and, and this is really about just. It's a, it's a, it's a manufacturing facility. It's, it's, it's, it's about, you know, how do you move the product efficiently from one place to another. And that was the innovation of it. It's really an architectural innovation. I think the other big thing that hurt our predecessors is there's this idea that you could get the right growing system and then you could put it into a warehouse. Right. And Vertical Harvest is a purpose built facility. And what does that mean? That means that every aspect of, of the facility is thought through for the best cultivation of plants. What people don't understand is the lights are one thing. Yes. But in order to have a healthy plant, it's all about airflow, relative humidity, the temperature, the CO2, all of it. And so to try to put a growing system into a warehouse and retrofit, that is a big challenge. And it's just like in my industry and architecture, you know, a renovation is actually much more complicated than a new build, because a new build, you can address all of the things you're always behind in a renovation, from energy to airflow. That is something that Vertical Harvest took really seriously. And I think that that put us ahead of the game as well. And with each farm that we have the opportunity to develop, we will be able to iterate on that and get better and better through the data of the platform that we're growing. So I think that was really important.
And then finally, I think that a lot of my colleagues and competitors were trying to compete with Budweiser, right? They're like, okay, we have this head lettuce and let's, let's go. We're going to feed the world, right? When you're trying to compete with a commodity product at a scale like that, you're going to be driven to be the lowest cost producer and that doesn't work. So for us, from the beginning, we drove flexibility. We want to be the craft beer, the artisanal blend that is regionally appropriate and that differentiates itself from the commodity produce. So it has a margin that we can work with. Of course, we do grow lettuce, because everybody wants lettuce. But we have the petite greens, the herbs, the microgreens that really drive the portfolio to the margin mix that we need to succeed. And I think a lot of our colleagues and competitors were only growing one type of crop and, and that in the end, when they needed to, to diversify, it was too late.
Sean Ferrell: So do you see your competition is not necessarily the large scale farms, but more the idea that the product needs to come from other parts of the world as opposed to being able to be a community center and a community driven product. Is that the competition here, not the farms that exist in various parts of the country where they're growing things like corn and wheat and everything else?
Nona Yehia: Well, definitely not corn and wheat, but what we're trying to do. So let's look at Maine. Maine imports over 95% of its produce. Maine grows blueberries and potatoes. So we need to have produce in that mix. And so an average head of lettuce travels over 1500 miles to get to me. And so what we're trying to do is everybody, I think, eats romaine, right, or iceberg, because it can handle that journey. But what if we had a locally hyper, local, you know, source of leafy greens that push nutritional value as well as taste value. Right. And so people start to understand that lettuce has a lot more diversity than just iceberg or romaine. So I'd say that our competitors are regional distributors of controlled environment of leafy greens at this moment. Right. So in our area, there's a large scale farm that only can grow head lettuce, but that would be our main competitor and they're out of Massachusetts. So that would be where I see our main competition happening. Or some of the local indoor farms that can grow all year round.
Sean Ferrell: You talked about a lot of the competitors were setting themselves up. We're a tech company. We happen to be solving a problem, which is agriculture, as opposed to going the other direction. I wonder what were some of the places in your development where you had some aspirations to incorporate technologies that you said, okay, we're going to have to incorporate that later. We're going to table that for now because our main goal is this other thing. And what are the ways that you might be reincorporating some of that technology in the future?
Nona Yehia: Well, I think in Jackson everything is very, you know, we have three stories of production with had a real diversity of crops. We grew tomatoes in Jackson and we grew lettuce, you know, herbs, petites and microgreens. And I love that. I mean, we grew 60 different types of microgreens. It was just amazing. Like, you know, micro tangerines, like, just. It was the Willy Wonka of, you know, indoor farming. It was just a beautiful, beautiful place. And I love that, that, that experimentation, because I think that's one of the benefits of this tool. And I think we had to really streamline, we had to say, okay, what is our product mix? How do we excel at this? And so we did. You know, we. And the pandemic helped because we were like, all right, let's. Let's bring it in. Let's streamline the whole thing. You know, we never. We never missed a day of operation, but it's all very manual. We didn't experiment with automation. We did that in Maine, and I'm really excited about the result of that. And then finally, and what we're getting into now is this whole kind of digital backbone. How can we stitch the whole farm together? In Jackson, we have very separate tools that help the farm run, but they're very isolated, each in their own silo. In Maine, we've been working with Siemens to create what we call the digital backbone that connects how the workforce operates, the plants, the health of the plant, our outputs, our sustainability outputs. It's like a digital floor manager that can be remote, right? And we're building that with Siemens, and I'm really excited to even push that further in terms of the data that we can collect and to put a final AI layer on it. You know, to really use physical AI to be able to collect the data that's necessary to optimize the facility and facilities moving forward. I think that's where the real promise of this is.
In Jackson, we were like, okay, that's all really interesting, but if we don't get the product right, we can't do any of that. And so we really focused on the product and the workforce. And like, you know, we went through seven generations of lighting to get to the one that was highlighted in the video and really understanding, you know, the. The benefit of LED lighting and, and how to use it. So we had to really focus on the operational aspect before we. We started to iterate and enhance. And as an architect, I always want to iterate. And I think my team. I think my team. I drive my team crazy because there's never a done right. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, let's get better. Let's do. Do it better, you know, So I think it drives me crazy at a certain point, but I think everybody's in it. Because of that, it's, it's been fun to watch.
Matt Ferrell: Continuing the technology question, one of the things I've seen in the comments already on the video I put out, which was around like the energy use of the building, it's like, here's this one and a half megawatt facility and a lot of people just immediately write it off of, oh, that's not worth it. You can grow stuff out in the open and it's free sunshine. Why are you going to waste all that energy built doing something that nature can do for you?
Nona Yehia: Yes.
Matt Ferrell: What's your response to that kind of comment?
Nona Yehia: Well, I loved it. So many people watched it. My friend who's in the solar industry reached out and he was like, it's only 1.5 megawatts. He's like, wow. I thought it would have been much more, you know, I thought that that was really interesting. It has been the one, you know, focus point for this tool. I would say that in general there have to be trade offs. Right. Are we sure that we're always going to be able to grow lettuce outdoors consistently? Right. I have seen it recently and also in the past where a head of romaine has gone up to market price as like, you know, equivalent to a steak. Right. Because of some of the disturbances in the way that we grow outdoors. Environmental, however you want to look at it, you know, pestilence, any of it. Number one, we better be pretty certain that we're always going to be able to use dirt and sunshine and let's not even get into the quality of the dirt. But I also think that as the grid gets greener, so does this tool and we all have to start somewhere. I like to think about the solar industry. If we go back 20 years ago, everybody said it's too expensive, it doesn't have enough efficacy, it's never going to work. And now solar has been adopted. It took a long time. It panned out in terms of the investment EV vehicles. Right. I just bought my first EV. I feel very happy. It was good timing. But I think that, you know, again, what is the trade off? But now let me get into the specifics of how we handle it. So as I said, this is a purpose built building and Matt, you highlighted some of the tools that we've used. Right. So we're managing energy all over the place and we've had our facility benchmarked time and time again. We've modeled it in and out and now we're getting the data points.
But we have benchmarked about a quarter of the energy of some of our colleagues and competitors because of the purpose built approach. Also, you know, we have the ability to adapt to different market strategies, like Arik was talking about in the video, of being able to use peak usage hours. And now that we have the data, we're implementing that right away. So it is an issue. It is one that people should take note of. But I think that it's not an insurmountable issue. And I think we're doing a really good job at addressing it. And I think there will come a time where this becomes like we have designed our way out of it and that we are a reasonable consumer of energy. Are we there yet? No, but there is the potential to be there. And I'm excited about our ability to do just that. And it really starts with being thoughtful consumers of it. And so we know it's a problem and we're addressing that problem head on. It's one of our biggest priorities.
Matt Ferrell: I asked the question of Arik, I think it was, why not put solar on the roof? And I didn't put it in the video, but along the lines of, you wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to what you would need because the size of the building is so small, you would not be able to produce anything significant.
Nona Yehia: And, you know, everybody's an engineer, everybody's an architect. Oh, we should just put solar on the roof. And we're like, great idea. You know, and so what I enjoy is the conversation. Right. And I think I was really actually very happy with your comments. Everybody was very thoughtful. It's probably the way that you present these issues is through curiosity. And I think we need more curiosity in the world. Right. That replaces reactive judgment. And I think if we're all curious about the things that mean something to us, then we'll get somewhere. I think fighting for our beginnings in Wyoming, as a woman who was not very apparently a farmer, I have skin that's nine inches thick. Right. But I think that by embracing our skeptics as much as our supporters, we have learned so much. And that's how you build a good business. Because your skeptics will ask you the hard questions and. And you better have answers. Right. My colleague very rightly was like, Nona. Okay, now you put the comments away.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: It's important to be challenged, but it's not. It's not worth getting into a mud fight. Yeah.
Nona Yehia: You have to keep your head down and keep moving forward. And I think that's what Vertical Harvest has done. So beautifully. And again, I really hope that we are able to prove the model out. It is. Innovation is challenging always, but there are some ideas that are worth fighting for, and I believe this is one of them.
Sean Ferrell: That's terrific. Yeah. Thank you again for taking the time to talk to us. This has been terrific. If the audience of this podcast has additional questions, I hope we could follow up with you and see about having another conversation at some point in the future.
Nona Yehia: Yeah. Thank you for. For putting our story out there. I think it's one that deserves being told. And. And I really appreciate you doing that. And I also loved that so many of our stakeholders was like, wow, that was brave of you to do it. And, you know, and. And I remember when we were discussing, you know, being a part of your show, we were like, well, we're all about transparency, so that's what we gotta do. Let's keep the conversation going. So, again, thank you for handling it so thoughtfully, and we're excited to continue the conversation wherever it leads us.
Matt Ferrell: I appreciate you taking a leap of faith and letting me come in, not knowing what I was going to come out with at the end. I really do appreciate it.
Nona Yehia: Yeah, yeah. No, our pleasure.
Sean Ferrell: Once again, our thanks to Nona for joining us. I think that that conversation was really interesting, Matt. I. I was struck by the fact that for somebody who did not set out to be a farmer, for somebody who didn't set out necessarily even to be an entrepreneur, it really felt like she followed her passion, she followed her bliss, and she found herself in that terrain, and that's to be. That's to be honored. So congratulations to her. It's. It is very inspiring. Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I found myself. I found myself thinking, wow, it's. It's really a demonstration of the problems don't seem too big if you really care about the answer, as opposed to yes, I don't have any control over the things around me, so I'm just going to shut down.
Matt Ferrell: So it's the whole reason I pick the topics I do on the channel, because it's like I like talking and learning about smart people doing smart things. This is no different.
Sean Ferrell: So before we close the show, I wanted to revisit a couple of comments that we spotted in the video itself. This is the better than farms video. Why this vertical farm is 500 times more efficient than farming. And right off the bat, I couldn't agree more with Torres, who jumps into the comments to say, it would be nice to revisit this place in six months to one year. I think so. Too. I think it'd be interesting to follow them for the next few years because I. I would think we're going to see more of these sites and potentially more businesses on this model than just this one. So. Yes, agree with you, Torres.
Matt Ferrell: On top of which, when I saw what you saw in the video, they were just starting to scale up the facility. Imagine what that place is going to look like when it's fully humming and you go into the germination room and every rack is filled. You know, it's like, that's going to be a sight to see. Yeah. But it looks like in full operation.
Sean Ferrell: I also liked her comparison to being a craft brewery. Regional, local and how might they differ from one another is really interesting to think about. One part of the country might be leaning into one type of product, whereas another part of the country is going to go a completely different direction simply because of regional tastes, the desire for certain types of food in different areas. Maybe some part of the country doesn't need lettuce in the same way as Maine does. So grow something else that can't be grown in that part of the country. I think it's really going to be fascinating to see what happens. Also, this from Lonnie, who said, I think this makes more sense using the power for this than another data center and its power demand. I think, yes. Not that we're necessarily like pitting industries against each other.
Matt Ferrell: No, no, no, no.
Sean Ferrell: But I find myself thinking like, oh, yeah, you want to. You want to use that power to grow food, go for it. As opposed to ChatGPT's are you wanna use that power for ChatGPT to make a picture of a cat dribbling a basketball. Thank you. And finally, the best, worst comment. We have a twofer right next to each other. Devil Doc jumped in at 4 minutes and 38 seconds into your video, Matt, to say how crazy the Internet is. I went to college with Lindsay. I had no idea this is what she was up to all these years later. So, Devil Dog, I'm really glad you. Devil Dog, I'm really glad you got to catch up on what Lindsay's up to. Yeah, she was there talking about, we're putting the seeds into this thing and we're germinating these panels, so. And then from Polo Dog echoed exactly what Matt and his cameraman said in the video itself. My eyes. Yes, that was a lot of bright pink light. I also, Matt wanted to congratulate you on coining spinach vision. Well done.
Matt Ferrell: You like that?
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I did. So, listeners, viewers Let us know what you think. Jump into the comments. Let us know. We always appreciate your comments and we'll help inform future videos as we continue this conversation. And as always, your comments. Liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all free and easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you want to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. Then we get down to the heavy business, talking about what kinds of lettuce we're going to eat with dinner tonight. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.