Bowery Farms founder and CEO Irving Fain wants you to taste the best strawberry you’ve ever had, grown only a few miles from your urban home. As the leading and largest vertical farming company in the U.S, their goal is to make agriculture possible in urban spaces while also making it possible to grow a wide array of crops from anywhere in the world. Darrell and Jordan talk to him about how agtech companies all have a space in the fight against climate change, what led him to start Bowery, and how they are innovating and scaling thoughtfully.
Bowery Farms founder and CEO Irving Fain wants you to taste the best strawberry you’ve ever had, grown only a few miles from your urban home. As the leading and largest vertical farming company in the U.S, their goal is to make agriculture possible in urban spaces while also making it possible to grow a wide array of crops from anywhere in the world. Darrell and Jordan talk to him about how agtech companies all have a space in the fight against climate change, what led him to founding Bowery, and how they are innovating and scaling thoughtfully.
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Darrell Etherington 0:01
Hello and welcome to found I'm your host, Darrell Etherington, and I'm here with the wild, artisanal strawberry to my garden variety boring old strawberry.
Jordan Crook 0:12
You're boring. My name is Jordan. Hey, Jordan. This week, I don't actually think you're one.
Darrell Etherington 0:20
I was just gonna take it in stride. Thank you for specifying that. So, you know the podcast. This is the podcast where we bring you the stories behind the startups. This week, we're talking to Irving Fein from Bowery farming, which is the largest vertical farming company in the US and they develop farms in urban spaces to grow produce locally. It's better for people and the planet. So before we get started with Irving, just want to remind everybody to like subscribe, rate review, give us all the best marks and whatever podcasts thing of your choice that really helps us here on found and it just brings a lot of joy to me and Jordan both right Jordan
Jordan Crook 0:59
are basically joyless. So anytime you can even do a little bit that's a huge just give us a
Darrell Etherington 1:04
little top up and then we can go about our lives for another day. But then we did another shot. All right. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get into the farming zone with Irving. Hey, everybody, how's it going? Hey, doing good, good. So we're thrilled to have you we, me and Jordan I think know about Bowery farming, but our listeners might not for me. I'm speaking for you. There's I always do go ahead Jordan. Do you know
Jordan Crook 1:36
I know you have a new facility in near where I live in Bethlehem right?
Irving Fain 1:40
Yeah, you live in Bethlehem are close. No, I
Jordan Crook 1:42
do not. I live in New Hope but close enough like in terms of the likelihood that I live near a Bowery farms location. This is true. This is true. interest out there. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 1:53
that's great. But just to take a step back. For our listeners who may not be familiar. Do you want to give a just a high level overview around what Bowery farming does?
Irving Fain 2:01
Yeah, absolutely. So Valerie, we're building large warehouse scale smart indoor farms. And in our farms, we stack our crops from the floor to the ceiling, we grow food under lights that mimic the spectrum of the sun. And we grow in a totally controlled and contained environment. That means we can grow fresh protected produce 365 days a year independent of whether an independent of seasonality and on top of it, it's actually produces completely pesticide free agro chemical free food, we grow more than 100 times plus more productive than a square foot of farmland outside. And we use a small fraction of water compared to traditional agriculture. And what makes that all possible is a lot of the technology that underlies the business. So we employ a substantial amount of robotics and automation that we design and develop. And then we've built what we call the Bowery operating system, which is the combination of software and hardware and computer vision and AI that manages and maintains the entirety of our operation.
Darrell Etherington 3:02
Awesome. Okay, so pretty good explanation of like, why it's a super serious tech company on top of being an agricultural company. But I one question I have just kind of off the bat is like, there's a reason people grew stuff, it was easier, right? It's easier to do it the other way to do it, the sun, the sun
Jordan Crook 3:19
really helped. That's a big one.
Darrell Etherington 3:21
It's one help.
Jordan Crook 3:22
It's like probably, because it's the free energy we all do.
Darrell Etherington 3:27
But then on the other hand, if I think of another metaphor, if I think of like a filming metaphor, it's way easier and cheaper to do in a sound studio than it is on location. So is Bowery, like the sounds to the farming world.
Irving Fain 3:42
So it's an interesting analogy in Jordan says something it's worth us taking into as well, just about kind of free Sun, which is, of course true, the sun is free in principle, but actually, there's lots of embedded cost in the system that relies on the sun being free, that cost just lives in different places. And a lot of that actually ties to the fact that what we're doing and this is where the the metaphor of soundstages breaks down is. What we're really doing at Bowery is of course, reimagining farming. You If you've seen our farms, they don't look anything like the farms, we probably all grew up reading books about it's not old McDonald's farm. That's there's no question about that. But young McDonald's is the new McDonald's farm. That's right. And, and what makes the reimagination of farming important is it really isn't enabling us to reinvent the entirety of the supply chain. And so building a new supply chain that's a lot simpler, it's much safer, it's much more sustainable, and it can provide much more surety of supply itself. And the reason that's possible is we've uncoupled what's been the determinant variable and food supply chains for as long as you can remember, which is only certain food and crops grew at certain times of the year in certain places, right. And so we've adapted in to that reality as the world has grown populations grown tastes have changed and rollin as well. And that's really what we're changing, right? It's this idea to your point. And this is where the analogy of the film studio does hold true, you don't necessarily anymore need to go out to the wild west to film a Western, right, you can do it in the deep Brooklyn area, or you can go do it in a soundstage in you know, really anywhere you into northern Canada, for that matter as far from the West as you can kind of be that change the way you can make film in the same way that this has completely changed the way you can grow food. But most importantly, the way you can actually build a supply chain that is really built for today, not the supply chain that we've sort of inherited from decades. So then
Jordan Crook 5:36
I'm like the definition of a noob when it comes to climate stuff, right? So like, I'm not a genius here. But I know a few things. And one is that regenerative agriculture is not just like getting us back to net neutral, but it's actually beneficial, right, like it's a net positive to do that with the soil. Is that a fair statement?
Irving Fain 5:57
Absolutely fair. Absolutely.
Jordan Crook 6:00
So then let's say that that's true, right. And it also accomplishes a lot of the same stuff that we're talking about with supply chain, maybe not to the same extent, but it like moves the progress bar further along in terms of like, I can do multiple deliveries of whatever you might need to grow these things and pick up these things at a relatively similar time or in a simpler way than going to 25 different locations for 25 different crops. So I'm just curious how you think about that, right? Like where that sits on the spectrum and how you guys approached that as like another system that's being put forward to like reimagine farming.
Irving Fain 6:35
And the first answer to the question, Jordan is, there are a number of different solutions and approaches that are required to solve certainly when we're looking at the climate crisis in total, and that extends well beyond food and agriculture. But even if you're just looking within food and agriculture's impact around climate, which is substantial, but just to give you a sense of it, a third of global and about 30% of the European Union, greenhouse gas emissions all come from the food system, right, we just think about what 1/3 of all greenhouse gas emissions are coming from food and agriculture system at large changes in that system itself are critical. And the notion that one approach, certainly not one company can provide that solution just doesn't make any sense. We need an enormous variety and diversity of approaches and solutions. In the coming years in the coming decades to reverse a lot of the problems that we've created over the prior decades. That's of course, in the way we grow food. That also comes down to things like we need to eat less meat, we need to make animal agriculture substantially more sustainable across a number of different manners. I'm a big believer in cultured meat and the technologies that exist there as well. We need to think about inputs that are being put on crops, and how can you find biological inputs versus synthetic inputs. And so all of these different components of the solution and regenerative agriculture is another one of those pieces all have to become a part of the puzzle. And then they have to be paired with energy solutions and transportation solutions and everything else that gets talked about. That's how you have to tackle climate. And so it's not a zero sum game. It's that we need, we need as many shots on goal here as we can find to build the system that we all need for tomorrow. And what we have today is a food system that is in transition. Yeah, no, I think yeah,
Darrell Etherington 8:25
Irving, when you're talking about kind of the advantages, the Berry has a really traditional farming methods. And now when you're talking about that, like they have multiple approaches, a lot of what you build obviously stacks, right as other solutions come online. So as you do like more clean power generation, that means your solution is more and more efficient.
Irving Fain 8:44
In fact, we actually power all of our farms today with 100% renewable energy. Oh, great. That's really important. And actually, if you go back to the conversation about the supply chain, what we've really done is taken a supply chain that unfolds over 1000s of miles and numerous different players. And we've collapsed it essentially into a building that's close to the communities that we're serving. And then that entire building is power. And everything inside of it is powered by renewable energy. And so even if today you went out and said, Hey, I want to power today's supply chain with renewable energy, I believe eventually we'll be able to do that. But you can't do that today, because there's lots of components of that supply chain where they just don't even have an option. So there's a real advantage in that. The other thing I would say Jordan to the tiller, probably question you asked is regenerative farming is fantastic in lots of ways because treating our soil in a more healthy way is critical. rotating crops in a more productive and effective way is critical. And there's lots of folks out there who are enormous advocates of this and really leading the way. There is however a challenge whenever you're growing food outside, which is unfortunately we're living in an increasingly uncertain and unreliable world and that uncertainty and unreliability is coming in multiple forms. First of all, the climate unreliability is enormous. Example at least it hits home for me because I'm a huge hotspots fan is if you haven't seen this like There is a legitimate shortage right now across Russia. Yeah.
Jordan Crook 10:03
But I didn't think that was just climate related. I thought there was some like cool personal drama going on. I was upset and I hiked prices, and he was like, you keep my peppers for myself? Is that just something I heard? That was totally untrue. So
Irving Fain 10:18
So you are the reporter, I'm a journalist. You're the journalist and the two of us so. So I would say that maybe there is some truth in that, however, the driving force of this without questions back that, yeah, there's a massive shortage of peppers that are coming out of California and Arizona and Texas, in the areas that we grow them. And why because we're dealing with 1000 year drought in that part of the country. And, you know, plants need water to grow it. And so you're you have this incredibly unreliable climate around us. And we're finding more and more of these disruptions happening every single year. And so even if you're growing food outdoors in a more responsible way, there's no guarantee that the external variables that you rely on are even going to be there. But then there's the other side of this, which is what we're seeing right now unfold with Russia and Ukraine. And this understanding that we've built a really efficient and wide global network that provides us with not just the food we need, but actually the inputs to grow the food we need. Yeah. But that network relies on other countries, other parts of our country, other players across the world that may be less reliable than historically they were you're seeing right now the world recognized, hey, food is national security and sovereignty, it's not just what we need to eat. There's a bigger picture here, too.
Darrell Etherington 11:34
So you see, this is similar to Jordans question about regenerative farming, but like, you also see a lot of work towards building more adaptive, more resilient crops, right to address some of those issues you're talking about, which would serve a couple of purposes could serve like changing climate in the places where they're already growing, and could serve being able to grow new crops in places where you previously couldn't if you were trying to do onshoring, but it sounds like it's another case of like, yes, but we want to do all of these things. And I mean, a seventh question to that would be like, do you work from that angle to do you look at modifying plants to grow better in the circumstances that you want to do to increase efficiency?
Irving Fain 12:10
It's a fantastic question, Darrell. And actually, it's one of the things that gets me sort of the most excited about what we're doing at Bowery, you know, when we look at what we're building, it's really the ability to provide food wherever it's needed, and we can grow food wherever it is needed. So that already is a distinction from today's system. If you pull back from that, what 10,000 years of agriculture has been about I mean, all the way back from the Tigris and Euphrates was how do we manage against a set of our externalities that are out of our control, right, until the first big invention was like, Hey, we can pick seeds, and we can actually plant them in one place. And so we all have to run around and find food, we can actually just live in this one place around the food that the seeds that we're planting, and then we started to say, Oh, we can turn those seeds better and turn those crowds better. And we got tools. And then we mechanize those tools and call it mid century in the 1900s. We said, Oh, wow, like what the world wanted post World War Two was abundance of cheap food that was produced quickly and efficiently. Yeah. And that's where we started to say, hey, well, what if we start creating, you know, pesticides and insecticides and herbicides, and then also fertilizers and these other chemicals? And then sort of the pent ultimate answer to that was, well, we can actually start to play with the genetics of the crops themselves, all in the service of saying, how do we control against things that we can't control. And so at Bowery, what we've done is we flip the equation on its head. And so now all of these externalities are actually controllable. And there's something really exciting about that. Because when you look at what crops have been grown outside, it's a reasonably narrow variety of crops. And the reason is, what matters outside above all else is, does the crop resist drought? Does this crop resist pests? And will it travel very long distances, and oftentimes long periods of time, and show up and look good at your store? Yeah, and none of those variables impact us at Bowery. And so we can go back. And we have relationships and partnerships now with seed companies across the world, and look decades back into their seed banks and germ plasm and find varieties and flavors and tastes of crops that you just would never be able to try grown outdoors because they don't meet those core three criteria that I mentioned before. Right. So before you even start doing breeding and these other work, which is really fascinating and exciting in and of itself, just the ability to no longer worry about transportation, drought and pests opens up an enormous Canvas to start to say wow, like there's crops that are fantastic that we wouldn't be able to try were it not for this new canvas that we can provide about
Darrell Etherington 14:37
Yeah, that's amazing. I'm very excited now to try like just the most fragile, just like it will crop if you look at it wrong it will Wilson disappeared dust but
Irving Fain 14:48
you know what a good example of this is is a strawberry right? Strawberries are incredibly tender and are incredibly fragile in that way. I mean, there are folks who will fly strawberries truly from California at certain times a year. You're because they can't actually even just make the trip across the country in a truck or a train or anywhere else. And it's the only way to get to All Raise to other parts of the country. And it's an incredibly fragile fruit. And the other part of it is we've become sort of accustomed as people in Kraftful world that a strawberry is just a strawberry. Yeah, right. Oh, that's a strawberry. And so what we just did about a couple of months ago, we released strawberries, or it's our first fruiting crop, which is going to expand beyond there, and we released it in a two pack. And so there's actually two different varieties. There's the garden variety, which is a better tasting version of the strawberry that we use on a regular basis. And then there's a wild variety, which sort of is similar to like this European freeze a berry, it has this like Concord grape kind of jammy texture. And when you eat them side by side, you immediately like, wow, these are completely different. They're both strawberries, but they taste completely different. And that kind of genetic diversity exists across every crop out there. We just don't get to experience it on average as consumers because again, of the supply chain that's been built, and then the limitations that are provides for all the benefits, it's provided us as well.
Jordan Crook 16:05
Yeah, I gotta remember to make sure that Danny doesn't listen to this episode, because she's got way too much on. You round. They're always in the fridge. I'm like these costs $12. Out of here, it's February. Those are trash. Those are the we don't even taste good.
Irving Fain 16:22
Well, that's the problem. If you want to enjoy something like a strawberry that you love, or a great tomato, that makes total sense, but it match tastes good, right?
Jordan Crook 16:31
Okay. So I want to like just pull up Jordan real quick and just shift totally. So something I've been thinking about a lot when you were talking about like multiple approaches are necessary, you could build the greatest technology, like the most seamless solution with all pros and no cons. But you'd still be going up against a massive global system, right? Like at some point, there is a clash between like, who exists and the status quo and this new, disruptive, innovative technology. And Bowery is like pretty well established, but is certainly not alone. There's like an army of companies that are doing the same thing in that climate ag tech space.
Darrell Etherington 17:13
Yeah. And we totally shifts. Venture right, which is very similar cooks venture on the chicken side, right with the heritage breeds that
Jordan Crook 17:22
they do, like regenerative and then they bio diverse diet, like white label, it's like, you know, it's cool. It's all synergistic as they would say, in the corporate world. But like, there are a bunch of them, right? Like I've talked to people who are doing like genetic alteration of bees so that they're more resilient so that they can pollinate more plants, you could go up and down the list, misfits market. And sure, there are competitors. But most of the time, you're all working towards a very similar goal and need powerful and negotiating kind of stance or positioning in order to clash against that existing system. So as the informed, naive person in the group, does it make sense to band together like, oh, grocery stores, or whoever it is, in the system that you're clashing against to be like, we're all in this together, you get all of this business, right? Or whatever stuff?
Irving Fain 18:08
Yeah, you're excited, you're making an important point, none of the technologies you just talked about, I would even think of as remotely competitive, too, right? I would agree completely. They're complementary and working towards the same solution that we are. And this goes back to the, you know, there's no one silver bullet to this problem. There's lots and lots of lead bullets. And all of those components that you talked about are critical pieces to this puzzle that we're working towards. So that sort of unity in mission I actually do think exists now. It's in its nascent sea, and part of its reason it's in its nascent Sea is because a lot of this industry is in its nascent sea. I mean, when I got started at Bowery, the amount of companies and sort of focus on agriculture was pretty limited. I mean, there was Climate Corp that had sold to Monsanto, there was company Blue River technology, which actually ultimately sold the John Deere, there was other folks who were working at SAS on the farm, you know, there were people in the space, but nothing close to what it looks like today. I mean, there was a 50 some odd billion dollars in 2021 invested into this category, which I actually think is a great thing, because this is a place where we need a lot of innovation. And so you're starting to see innovation in food and agri tech speed up at a at a rate and pace that we haven't seen before. And so the opportunity to work together is emerging right now, the other side to this is we're in the midst of a food system that's in transition today. I would argue to you that there's a lot of this it just isn't a choice. So just take lettuce in for an example. And we grow well beyond lettuces commercially, we focus on lettuces NURBS right now, but when you just look at lettuces, 90% of us lettuce production basically is concentrated in California and Arizona. And so I think we all sort of know what's going on in California, Arizona right now, as it relates to the drought. Inevitably, those are going to be two very challenged places from a growing perspective and like we're going to become increasingly more challenged. And so this is a different scenario than Hey, I've made a better telephone and somebody's looking and saying well I can just use My old telephone as well, that works just fine, too. This is a situation where the underlying system that we've relied on the Global Alliance we have on one another and the heavy reliance we have on places that are incredibly unreliable. Now from a climate perspective, it's forcing us to make a change whether we like it or not.
Jordan Crook 20:16
Right. But I mean, I guess maybe I'm like caring too much about this. But that type of coalition because like maybe right for you, you're like, I don't need too much negotiation power, like the Earth is doing it for me, you don't have another choice. But there are a bunch of startups like in and around you, that are small, and maybe you're like, would benefit insanely from being like, Okay, well, you can sell our crops in your grocery stores. But like, you also need to use this like forecasting tool for supply and demand. So you're not wasting food and the shelves and like blah, blah, blah, maybe it shouldn't be like a complete package deal. But you know, as the behemoth in the space, and it maybe it's not fair to call you a behemoth, but like, you do have a leg up in that climate space, your early boundaries, big, impossibles big Beyonds big, there are a handful that are really getting to that beyond growth stage. And the cues come from you. Is it something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, like how you can help the ecosystem of startups around you.
Irving Fain 21:13
So it's something we're spending more and more time thinking about now. And I would say we're spending time and even more than just us as a set of startups, you're starting to see policymakers, you know, certainly in the US, but even around the country, China's take a much greater interest in in what the future of food and agriculture is going to look like and how they can be supporting the Future of Food and Agriculture. And that can't just be large, established companies alone, it also has to be the newest and the earliest of technologies that one day themselves become large and established. I mean, I was talking to entrepreneur last week working in the bee space, as you talked about, which are more effective and efficient pollinating bees that have resilience to some of the challenges that we're seeing out in the bee populations across the country and across the world right now, which are declining incredibly rapidly, which is a huge problem. Because bees are needed for pollination. Yeah. So that type of partnership and cooperation is something I'm actually really excited about. And one of the things for me, that's most exciting just as not just an entrepreneur, but a citizen of the world is seeing the amount of innovation that's happening in this space now and just how many different areas and ways people are thinking about solving problems that even a few years ago, just what weren't on people's radar, and also the fact that there's now real mandates and interest in putting capital behind those ideas as well, because that capital piece is important to supporting that innovation in its early stages. The other piece of this puzzle, though, that is critical to remember is consumers are an important part of this piece. Yeah, this isn't about forcing change on a set of retailers. Because you think about a retailer, right? What's your job, it's to sell the things that the customers that you have want. And you've you have the rise now of a consumer that has much more awareness and understanding of the challenges and climate up there. They're asking questions, where's my food coming from? How's it grown? How's it made? What's in it? What's on it? And they're demanding better? They're demanding better from food companies, and they're demanding better from retailers. And so that's all
Darrell Etherington 23:02
regulation, which is, like the other motivator. And that's to recap, regulators are essentially retailers except, you know, promotes instead of dollars, right? That's right,
Irving Fain 23:11
those pieces together, and you just can't underestimate the pull from the consumer side. And its impact Jordan as well on bringing that technology for it. It's not enough alone, but it's powerful. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 23:23
So, Irving, I'm gonna pull up Jordan now and go in a completely different direction.
Jordan Crook 23:29
Let's see how you pull it off. Do you have as much grace in classes?
Darrell Etherington 23:33
I don't think so. There's an awkward transition. But you know, you've been doing this now, I think nearly eight years or so right at Bowery. But you have a long history before that of like, being a founder previously, and also working in like completely different industries. So you know, one of the things we like to talk about, here's kind of how you came to it. You came to So can you give a bit of a explanation of you know, why you're in this now, when especially your previous experience was like much more you know, marketing and omni channel, you know, loyalty products and stuff like that. And now you've arrived at the vertical farms.
Irving Fain 24:06
Yeah, it all dates back to my time as a child. Isn't
Jordan Crook 24:13
everything with all of us?
Irving Fain 24:14
Yes, right. But in truth, you know, I have wanted to be in both cars. I've been an entrepreneur since I was a little kid. You know, before I knew what the word was or how to spell it, I was just finding myself into any little hustle I could ever find. I mean, I remember as a really, okay, there's a store called Harrison's down the road. And I would go down there and have buy these little rubber animals for a dime. And I'd bring them home and I'd merchandise them in this Tupperware and they'd bring them to school and I'd sell them for a quarter.
Darrell Etherington 24:42
Here's some local drop shipping. Yeah,
Irving Fain 24:45
exactly. Exactly. Who knew they were a wholesaler. So I was sort of attracted. I don't know why. Right. You know, is it nature? Is it nurture? I don't know what it was. But I was attracted to just being an entrepreneur and building and creating from a young age and I've been doing it for Ever and but I've been working in and around tech for you know, about, you know, 1520 years. And what I've always believed is technology is a real powerful driver for change. And it can work towards solving hard problems work toward solving important problems. And I started off I helped to build I Heart Radio as a part of Clear Channel, I was a large old radio company that was there to figure out hey, what's what's digital gonna mean for traditional radio and the iPhone came out. And this idea of the App Store emerged, which is kind of wild to think about that new now saw an opportunity to aggregate all of this incredible content and I Heart Radio was born. It was great experience. I learned a ton from that. But I wanted to be an entrepreneur and not an intrapreneur. And so I left I started my first company called Crowd twist, which was an enterprise software business to raise a bunch of venture, you know, built that over six years, it was a really interesting marketing technology business again, and I learned a lot about just building and creating and working with huge brands there too, right? Yeah, we were working, you know, we sold to companies like Pepsi and L'Oreal and Nestle and Procter and Gamble and Toms Shoes, and a lot of folks in the retail space in the CPG space was a lot of our customer relationships, customer data, it was kind of driving change in a business, you know, customer loyalty, we all know, it's like proverbial punch card, right? Walk into a coffee shop, and I get a punch when I buy a coffee. And the kind of the premise was like, Well, yeah, the buying of the coffee matters. But there's so many other things around these big brands that matter to your interactions, socially, and mobile, and all these other places, too. We're measuring that in totality. So it'll actually is really interesting to me. But there's a part of me that wanted to work on something where I had a much greater personal passion. And also, I wanted to work towards solving a problem that I felt was a problem kind of more broadly focused on big societal challenges. So I left and you know, I stand on the board, we ultimately sold the business to Oracle. So it was a great outcome. But I started to kind of shift my focus to some of these kind of bigger pieces. And I looked at like trash and recycling, I looked at plastics, I was looking at agriculture, I looked at agriculture really broadly at first. So I was looking at drones on the farm and satellite imagery. And then some people said, oh, you know, SAS, why don't you go do SAS on the farm. And I just didn't feel like that was the fit for me, there were better people capable of building that what drove me initially to agriculture was just the fact that it's the largest consumer of resources globally, by a wide, wide margin, you know, 70% of the world's water, every year goes to AG, we put about 6 billion pounds of pesticides down annually across the world. And we've lost 30% of our arable farmland in just the last 40 years. So you've got a system that's under stress, you've got a growing population that needs more food, and then all the while 70 to 80% of the population is going to be living in and around cities in the next 30 years. So there's this real urbanization. And so I got really obsessed with this question of how do you get fresh food to urban environments? How do you do that in a way that's not only more efficient, but it's much more sustainable as well. And that was sort of the real kernel and the beginning of what ultimately led to Bowery. Cool,
Darrell Etherington 27:50
and Was it weird for you to get into this business where there's such a physical infrastructure component? Because like, nothing you did previously, kind of had that ingredient, right?
Irving Fain 27:58
I mean, it was a change in so many ways. I mean, you said before, you're like, I didn't grow up on a farm that a farmer that wasn't that wasn't my background. In fact, my background was in technology more than anything and building different technology companies, which was actually an advantage. I actually oftentimes the naivety is a real advantage as an entrepreneur,
Darrell Etherington 28:13
or slogan here at TechCrunch. Cover for we don't know.
Irving Fain 28:18
But in truth, sometimes you notice something about something you'll ask questions. They're fantastic questions in the right questions that someone who knows lots about something would never ask because they would only feel like they know the answer. Right? And, and your willingness to sort of Bumble into rooms that nobody in their right mind would Bumble into is what oftentimes on earth the most exciting and interesting opportunities. I came in with sort of a naive mind, in some ways, I understood the problem. I just taught myself everything I could around agricultural and food as much as I could learn, I read more USDA papers than you could imagine. And I actually loved the physical world component of it, right? I loved the fact that there was something that was always challenging for me in the software space. This like a theory or product you were building that you could never like, really put your hands on and touch and feel and what do you love about it? Well, you write bad code and you refactor it in an hour and boom, you're back. Right? You can't refactor a Bowery farm in an hour. There's,
Jordan Crook 29:10
you can like walk into it and like, eat a strawberry, which like, I mean, that's wild, like so many founders out there, like, Yep, I'm gonna go sit back down at my computer. Yep. And you're like, I'm gonna eat some lettuce actually eat my work.
Irving Fain 29:26
And not only eating it, walking into a farm and standing there and say, like looking at it. And there's lots that we can't see, you know, from the very operating system, but just having a physical manifestation of what we're working on. I think it's rewarding for everybody here. And the other part of it, that's interesting, as well as your software is incredibly important to our lives today. I mean, it's become obviously just, you know, a table stakes and most everything, but sort of the outside world's understanding of a lot of software businesses is oftentimes somewhat limited, whereas you talk about what we do at Bowery and within No seconds, people, their eyes often light up. And I understand that I get that I'm excited about that. That's an important solution to a problem that I care about. And there's something really nice as well for just there to be like a different way of just kind of grasping the concept itself, me and my last business, everyone kind of understood loyalty, and they kind of nodded along and we go, yeah, it was nice to raise some money, they, they're more excited about the raising of the money than the thing we were doing. And people are genuinely excited about what we're doing here. And I think that's motivating for everybody.
Darrell Etherington 30:29
So you brought up raising money? I did want to know about that, too, just because you had all that experience raising previously, did it translate or because like we were talking about it was such a shift, was it really difficult when you're on the early off and going out and asking people for money to support this,
Irving Fain 30:45
there's no doubt that just having been in an entrepreneur previously, and having started and run a company, it made a huge difference. Because you can imagine back in 2015, when I was first talking to people about this, this idea of like, hey, so I'm gonna build farms and warehouses and their crops, I mean, yeah, and we spent a year and a half building and testing and iterating systems before I ever raised $1, from people. But we didn't have some kind of huge farm to show somebody that just yeah, we just didn't have that not only did it sound crazy, but you needed to have some level of credibility for somebody to be able to look at you and say, Okay, I think they can do this, or at least I'm willing to take a shot that they can do this. And so having had experience beforehand, certainly helped me do that. And then the other thing that that really translated for in in the early days was the understanding of how important the relationship itself was with the early investors that you choose. So I just knowing how kind of wild and wacky the idea sounded at the time, I invested a lot of time upfront well, before raising any money, just spending time with people who I knew getting to know people who I didn't talking about what I was working on being really open about like, Hey, here's the questions we're trying to answer. And by the way, I may end up coming back to you and saying, Hey, we scrapped the idea, because it just didn't seem like it was possible. Like we really looked at it from a first principle standpoint, and we helped bring people along. Partly also, because this isn't something people knew about, right, they didn't know the five questions to ask us to see figure out that this was a good idea, you can show up now with enterprise software business, and an investor can probably ask you five to 10 questions and with those answers can evaluate your business pretty quickly.
Darrell Etherington 32:14
But on the other hand, it's a true big swing, right? So you track that kind of like that old school investor mentality of like, wow, this is real. If this pays off, it's gonna pay off massively. And it's also a huge risk. So that must be enticing to a certain category.
Jordan Crook 32:28
Would I talk about the old school VCs as though we're 75 years old? I've ever raised money or invested money,
Irving Fain 32:36
by the way, given the speed with which this industry is moving. Maybe we all are 75 years old, in tech years, maybe maybe there's a new measure. It's like dog years, but for tech. So I mean, we raised $6 million for our series, a crowd twist, and people were like, Oh, my God, that is so much money. I feel the same. But you know, I think this is what venture capital is for, in a lot of respects. That, for me, is one of the things I love the most about seeing the diversity of investments people are making. I mean, you're seeing space companies get funded, right? You're seeing you know, electric vehicle companies, you're seeing these Evie tall companies get funded. And I get that sometimes people say, Oh, how's that ever gonna work? You know, tell them it's not going to work. But that's okay. Because a lot of that financing is the point of the spear of innovation. Ultimately, it goes back to what we were talking about. The Jordan was asking about all of these different agricultural technologies, like people are taking swings now at types of businesses that five or 10 years ago, no one would have ever put venture funding. It was software consumer internet, that was it.
Darrell Etherington 33:38
Yeah. Yeah. And like you, especially when you were starting this, like it was kind of coming out of the disillusionment phase, right, like of the first green tech, sort of like, swing and miss. So that
Irving Fain 33:48
was clear. Was the clean tech bust. Basic. Yeah, it was the promise of the nevers delivered.
Darrell Etherington 33:54
Yeah. And did you have to contend with that at all? Or was it were you kind of like over adjacent to but we're not really, it's not directly tied? Or what I
Irving Fain 34:01
wouldn't say we contend with it as much it probably for two reasons. Number one, a little bit of time had passed, right. So some of the sort of acuity of nerves had probably scars have healed over a bit. Yeah, exactly. There was a little mitigation of that. And then the second piece of it was there is still this distinction of like food and farming felt different than sort of like that kind of energy piece of a lot of a clean tech was and for a lot of folks, when we were talking they they just hadn't heard or seen as much about food and farming. But it didn't take long to say, oh, yeah, this is a place that makes sense and requires a lot of innovation. I mean, that was one of the things that excited me I had come from marketing tech, where over the course of five or six years I saw the landscape just explode. I mean, just so saturated, and then I look at you know, here's agriculture, the oldest and the largest industry in the world. And you know, sorry for the ponds, which by the way, there are lots of agricultural ponds you learn when you work work in agriculture, but the amount of green space that existed was enormous. But it was true There was so much of it amidst like a huge opportunity as well. And that, for me was really exciting as well. And I think investors saw that to say, Wow, look how many places you can go look how enormous this category is. And then, as you were saying, like this is a place to take big swings, but that has enormous opportunities on the other side.
Darrell Etherington 35:15
Yeah, I think one thing I'm curious about now, like at the stage, you're at now, is it more for you now about scale about taking, like, look, what we've built, and let's get it as many places as possible? Or is there still a lot of refinement on the model and a lot of like, opportunity for new product development that you see, in the future,
Irving Fain 35:33
what it has become is multipronged now. So whereas it was really about only kind of model refinement iteration, we've really been believers in thoughtful scaling. That's been incredibly important to me about it. And a big part of that is because we have to build farms we were talking about, these are physical locations, you can't refactor a farm. Yeah. And so you want to make sure you get it as right as you can, which by the way, you will never get it. All right, you will always make mistakes and get things wrong, which I actually welcome that because it means we're taking risks ourselves, but you need to take smart and thoughtful risks, especially with that kind of capital or, you know, being spent on farms. So that was our primary focus. Now that we have a model that we really see working scaling that model forward is one part of the puzzle. But that innovative focus and effort will forever be a part of what we're doing is we've really only begun to scratch the surface, not only in terms of the crops we can grow, because expanding that crop variety across many, many more crops is a huge point of focus for us. And that will involve changes in the battery operating system that will involve automation and robotics changes. Like that's critically important. But there's so much more optimization we can do even within our farms, to continue to make them more effective and more efficient and learning like better ways of building better ways of running them the day we stop that iteration and innovation is the day I probably ride off into the sunset. And I can't imagine a day where that actually ends, because there's just so much there's so much more in front of us to where we've already gone.
Darrell Etherington 37:03
Nice. Yeah, I get that I mean talking to you, and you've been at this eight years, you still seem you know, as enthusiastic as excited as I would imagine you are like they want or whatever, you sound very genuinely just interested in what comes next, which is not something you hear a lot of times from somebody rejected.
Irving Fain 37:20
It's just it's a fascinating problem. And the other part for me, that is just pretty cool to be a part of and watch. It's just you have all these different people from different disciplines and experiences coming together to solve this common problem, right? So you go look at a room and there's a you know, a plant biologist and plant pathologist sitting next to a data science engineer sitting next to a mechanical engineer, and an electrical engineer, and a supply chain expert, and all sitting together working on this individual problem. And like bringing that diversity together around this one common goal. I mean, it's really amazing to watch, it's exciting to see what comes from it. It's actually something that hasn't happened in agriculture really before
Darrell Etherington 37:58
Yeah, and to have all that coming together, not around something that soon a university lab but something that's shipping product,
Irving Fain 38:05
yeah. Which has been a hugely important component of of what we're doing. So a big part of why I started Bowery is if you can find an economic engine that functions on its own and at the same time generates a positive impact. You can create exponentially more impact than just an NGO or nonprofits or universities doesn't mean that there's not an important place in the ecosystem for those institutions. There absolutely is. But using that kind of economic engine to drive substantial change is really powerful. And I'm a big believer, just that principle in and of itself.
Darrell Etherington 38:36
Yeah, for sure. Alright, Irving, I think we're just about out of time, but thanks so much. And we also believe in these ideas were good people, right, Jordan?
Jordan Crook 38:45
Were good people. They do close to most of the time,
Darrell Etherington 38:50
we just help from the side we're not like directly in it Although who knows maybe in the future me and Jared, and we'll start our own sustainable farming.
Irving Fain 38:59
Well, well, we can certainly tell you whether you start a farm or not, you should come and visit one of ours because I think you'll you'll enjoy it and it doesn't look like the farms that you drive by all the time.
Jordan Crook 39:10
I was thinking you could maybe put together a tasting of like the weirdest crops that we've never had an accent
Irving Fain 39:15
we have some weird ones wasabi arugula is that is one that always sounds a little spicy on its own.
Darrell Etherington 39:22
I love wasabi really? Really speaking my language here this Yeah, this
Irving Fain 39:26
is this is one of those crops where you try like Wow, a lot of people are like, Oh, is this where wasabi comes from? Like, no, no, it's obvious a root. This is just an arugula plant, but it okay.
Jordan Crook 39:34
Hi in splain wasabi to people.
Irving Fain 39:39
So we've got a whole cadre of crops we could roll out start. We should start with the strawberries though. All right, well, then
Jordan Crook 39:45
let's call it a date
Darrell Etherington 39:46
deal. All right, Jordan. That was our conversation with Irving. We brought up a number of different companies in there. So he's clearly in good company. Although they were pretty early, what do you think about the overall ag tech space and Barry's role in
Jordan Crook 40:05
it is really exciting. There are just you know, for a while there a few years ago, it was a lot of like, there's a sensor you can put on your farm. And then there's a data platform. And I think those are cool and great. And like, that's awesome, and drones and stuff. But I think there's just the solutions are getting so much more creative as we go. And so like, that's pretty cool. It gives me those vibes of like, when I first started as a tech reporter of like, holy shit, this is really cool. Like ad tech kind of always gets me in that zone. For some reason. Obviously, it's like, hugely important to the welfare of the planet. So I think that's cool. And I think Bowery farming is a really interesting company. There's very sci fi vibes to it. I do I don't know why this is like caught in my throat. But like, Why do you think they call it Bowery farming instead of Bowery farm? Ah, are Bowery farms. I think they do you think he likes Gerrans? Because his name is Irving.
Darrell Etherington 41:00
Oh, yeah, that may be it. That's actually probably the best answer. My answer was worse. I was just thinking like that. He talks about all the systems. I think at some point, maybe they and we should have asked him about this in retrospect, but maybe they have desires to sell the systems and technology, or they're doing all the hardware themselves, because you can tell if you get I was thinking about that. Yeah, if you if you get to scale, and you're like working with some of the major food producers in the world, maybe it makes more sense to be like, we'll give you the method. And you guys go ahead and kind of roll that out.
Jordan Crook 41:27
Right? Something active about it, too. It's like very in the present, but he is farming. Now, Bowery is Yeah, currently farming. And it's not just a place. It's an action. So maybe there's math to that. But yeah, I enjoyed the conversation, I kind of couldn't get off the thread of like, the collective bargaining power of these companies. And he was like, I don't need any bargaining power. I just, everything's gonna die without us. So they'll choose us eventually. But I did think it was an interesting conversation. And it is cool to hear about so many companies that are kind of like taking a different route to the same end goal. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool.
Darrell Etherington 42:08
Yeah, I think that the stuff he brought up, it's true. They're layering and kind of lucky position and that they're like in a rock and a hard place. It's like, well, you go this way, or you don't go at all, basically. But it is interesting that they're going into more active lobbying efforts, both with large companies and also with government. Right. So I think that should help float all boats that he was kind of alluding to, like, in that sustainable farming world. So that's pretty cool. But yeah, I think I'm so excited, too, about the fact that it's providing a real advantage to the consumer, that is not just like the same thing, but maybe a bit fresher, or whatever, or more plentiful. Like it's like, no, no, there's gonna be all kinds of new foods that you're not even used to, if this succeeds is
Jordan Crook 42:52
a new foods, but can you democratize the price of a food that normally you'd have to buy like organic and pesticide free, and you couldn't even be sure that it was at the grocery store, like the difference between shopping at giant and Whole Foods, but getting the same or better product, right. And like, that is actually a huge deal. Because if you think about part of the climate problem, it's not just the supply chain, or like the source material. It's the fact that we're going through and saying inflation, and we have disappearing middle class, and there are massive food deserts out there in the world. And so all those things combined mean like, even if you're doing it, if you're not doing it at the right price point with the right scale, it doesn't solve a lot of the problem, you know, yeah.
Darrell Etherington 43:39
Yeah. Well, I think that hopefully, they'll get there eventually. I mean, one of the things that I also wanted to ask him about that we didn't really have time to talk about was this is the Rugrats portion regression portion. Yeah. But speaking of scale, like does this model work in like, he was talking about how demand for food is scaling despite reductions in our ability to produce it? So in terms of like arable land and stuff, but like the places where that's most extreme are in not in like developed Western world, it's in like, Africa, or like India, or places where the population continues to boom, and all these demands continue to boom, and there's like, no availability and no money, right? So like, can it scale down to that and start to address some of those problems as well?
Jordan Crook 44:21
It doesn't seem obvious the reasons why it couldn't. But this is one of the if we're talking about regrets, like, one of the things that I wish that we had talked to him more about was just like how to stay focused because it does feel like Bowery farming is one of those things where you could probably do a million things, right? Like, even in the, like, 10 minutes that we've been talking about it post facto, is like, I mean, you could white label, you could go global, you could start launching all these random foods people have never heard of, you know, like, it's kind of an endless list. And companies who do that or have those options tend to get in trouble by trying to bite off more than they can chew. No pun intended aside. I wish that we had maybe covered that bit too. Well, what else? Do you feel like we missed? Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 45:05
well, I also wanted to ask him if he has plans to make little tiny cows and then stack all the 10 cows on little paddocks vertically. So
Jordan Crook 45:13
that doesn't feel on brand for him. But it is a cute joke. Well, I wonder if he's vegetarian?
Darrell Etherington 45:19
I don't know. He was alluding to listen, all you've established there's so much we don't know that we need to go to with Irving and we'll probably set that up sometime in future but
Jordan Crook 45:30
you know, bring our mics. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 45:33
yeah. When we go to visit the farm, it'll be an on location. Farm kennis special
Jordan Crook 45:37
berries. All right. Well,
Darrell Etherington 45:39
yeah, I think lots to think about and that's what the show Darryl of the podcasts for it's a brain homework for you listeners. Give us some good things. Come back to us. But thanks for joining us. Now is hosted by myself. TechCrunch news editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch Managing Editor Jordan crook. You shouted McCarney is our executive producer. We are produced by Maggie Stamets and edited by Cal Keller TechCrunch. His audio products are managed by Henry pick of it. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and on twitter@twitter.com slash fan. You can also email us at found@techcrunch.com and you can call us and leave a voicemail at 510-936-1618. Also, we'd love if you could spare a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at bit.li/bound listener survey. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week
Jordan Crook 46:37
the farming zone here we are on the pasture.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai