Ever wondered how to scale your vertical farm without breaking the bank—or your nerves?
In this episode of the Vertical Farming Podcast, I sit down with Tristan Fischer, CEO of Fisher Farms, one of the pioneers in modular farming technology. Tristan brings over 25 years of experience in clean energy and large-scale renewables, translating that expertise into creating more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective vertical farming solutions. Having navigated the challenges of building some of the largest vertical farms in the UK, Tristan is passionate about making vertical farming both accessible and sustainable—and he’s got the battle-tested insights to prove it.
We dive deep into Fisher Farms’ journey from traditional R&D setups to their cutting-edge modular approach, using shipping containers like building blocks for truly scalable farms. Tristan shares candid stories about the risks and surprises of massive farm construction, and how clever modular design is transforming the economics and flexibility of indoor agriculture, enabling global expansion—even in places like Abu Dhabi, where energy costs are astonishingly low.
Beyond technology, we explore Fisher Farms’ culture of innovation, their relentless focus on driving down costs, and why Tristan believes vertical farming should move from premium niche to practical staple for feeding the world. You’ll hear how the team’s values—kindness, respect, factfulness, and robustness—help foster big ideas and quick pivots, and how these principles drive Fisher Farms to be the lowest-cost vertical farm in the world.
If you’re ready to rethink what’s possible with vertical farming and discover how modularity might be the answer to your growth headaches, don’t miss this episode! Click play and join us as we explore the future of feeding the world—without wrecking the planet.
Ready to stop dreaming and start building a profitable, impactful vertical farm that transcends tired food system models? Click to listen and get inspired by Mary’s story, strategy, and actionable insights!
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Key Takeaways
00:00 Fisher Farms Expansion and Modular Approach
06:01 Overcoming Scaling Challenges at Farm Two
12:01 Fisher Farms Ethos and Focus on Cost Reduction
18:31 Advancements in Lighting and Efficiency
23:40 Competing with Glasshouses and New Market Opportunities
29:54 Modular Growth in the UAE and Global Impact
35:03 Plug and Play Modular Flexibility
40:02 Fisher Farms Technology Certification and Branding
46:08 Building an Innovative, Kind, and Robust Company Culture
52:42 Closing Reflections and Future Outlook
Tweetable Quotes
"If you have a thousand things which need to get right, I think we probably planned for about 900 of them and got them right, and then once Farm 2 got running, 50 of them were relatively quick to fix, but there were a few items which actually ended up being very, very difficult. Sometimes you had a problem hiding behind another problem."
"Our view is that if we focus on really driving down cost, cost, cost, cost, then we don’t have to worry about becoming a premium brand—but it gets us in the direction where we want to be, which is: how do you actually feed the world without trashing the planet at the same time?"
"What we want is my terrible idea and a genuinely bad idea, and your crazy, insane idea and somebody else’s drug-addled idea or sleep-addled idea—whatever it is—and they’re all actually genuinely bad ideas independently, but by putting those ideas together, layering those ideas on top, we come up with a beautiful, brilliant insight which none of us independently had thought about."
Resources Mentioned
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristanfischer/?originalSubdomain=uk
Website - https://fischerfarms.co.uk/
Connect With Us
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VFP Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/VerticalFarmPod
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1
So, Tristan Fisher, CEO of Fisher Farms, thank you so much for round two on
2
the vertical farming podcast. Thank you. It's good to be, good to be back.
3
So for. I'll direct the listeners and the viewers to that episode.
4
We'll make sure that's in the show notes so they can get the origin story.
5
So we don't have to do too much of a deep dive there, but just
6
remind everyone where home is for you. So we are
7
based in Britain in the UK and Fisher Farms has
8
three sites now. So we've got Farm One, which is just north of
9
Birmingham, which is a 3200 square meter
10
vertical farm, which is mainly our research and development farm
11
now. And then we have Farm two, which is
12
just west of Norwich in England or east of
13
Cambridge. And that is a 25,000 square
14
meter growing surface area farm, which makes it one of the largest vertical
15
farms in the world. And then we have a factory
16
near Birmingham airport at about 35 minutes away
17
from farm one, where we have a factory building
18
our next generation modular
19
vertical farms which are using shipping containers to be the
20
building blocks, almost like Lego of large vertical farms. So it's
21
a different from sort of a freight farm, shipping
22
container story, which is very much sort of individual units. It's
23
much more of using that structure to create
24
large vertical farms, but in a very, very modular fashion. But we can talk
25
about that. Yeah, for sure. So last time we spoke, I think Farm 2
26
was just under construction. So let's start there. Like
27
bring us up to speed what's happened since then. And it's
28
a big jump from the size of Farm one to Farm two. Yeah. So I
29
think it's a fascinating process actually going from
30
3,200 square meters to 25,000 square meters. And it
31
wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all. And
32
we had a number of issues and it's sort of an
33
interesting one about size and
34
how you scale. And so
35
sort of the good news is that now it's working very well.
36
But it took us 18 months or so to build, but about
37
24 months to fix. And
38
it wasn't that we went into the project not
39
knowing anything about what we wanted to do and stuff like that. And we actually
40
built, planned a huge amount of our processes.
41
You know, we had a good understand of what we're going to do. Our software,
42
we had a very good understand about automation. We actually created an
43
entire automated harvesting, seeding, washing
44
line at Farm one. Just a practice about what we do. At
45
Farm two, we built new
46
versions of our Building, which was a sort of different type of
47
construction material out in Farm one as well. So we had a
48
lot of things that we planned and thought of. And I think that
49
if you have a thousand things which need to get right, I think we
50
probably planned for about 900 of them and got them right and we got the
51
right. And then once Farm 2 got running,
52
50 of them were relatively quick to fix. And then we probably
53
had, you know, a good sort of 35 or so which were
54
harder but doable. But there were a few items which actually
55
ended up being very, very difficult. You know. So to sort of some,
56
some examples, we used the software for Farm
57
one to Farm two, which kind of makes sense. But because Farm two
58
is so much bigger, we had a whole bunch of software issues which were
59
unexpected. So for example,
60
we had had a whole conveyor system and our
61
bench trays which we sort of grabbed out of our tunnels and took them onto
62
a big robot, onto a conveyor system. As they went along the
63
conveyor system, there were a whole series of sensors. And the sensors would say stop
64
and the tray would just continue going. And we were like, why
65
are you continue going? You know, it's sensors saying stop that we can see from
66
the logs that it's actually seeing that it's there. But the problem
67
was that there were so many movements were taking place at the time
68
that the computer wasn't fast enough to calculate
69
all of the movements. And so it said stop. And then the
70
CPU dressedly is churning his mind, okay, okay, fine, it would
71
stop, but a little bit too late. And so sometimes we'd have
72
bench trays just falling off the edge of the conveyor system
73
because they just hadn't stopped in time. We had other
74
issues whereby each. So just to sort of get your
75
head around the sort of layout of system, imagine a long
76
corridor is 100 meter long corridor. And then on the side,
77
left hand side and the right hand side of the corridor are 20 tunnels,
78
10 on each side, 10 on the other side. And all these big
79
yellow doors which open and we have
80
an automated storage retrieval unit which goes along and
81
the door automatically opens. The arm reaches
82
out, grabs the tray and pulls the tray onto the robot
83
down and then onto the conveyor belt and goes all the way around. And
84
so we did a full scale test of this in our
85
factory. And so we had each one of the tunnels was
86
actually 40 meters long. So it's a long tunnel. So we did a
87
20 meter dummy tunnel with the robot going to
88
in front of the 20 meter tunnel and first of all, we did a five
89
year test. So we basically said, if you are cycling through
90
all these trays over five years, what is the result going to be? And so
91
we did a five year test. It was like absolutely fantastic, thought, wow, this is
92
great. And then I said, let's do a 20 year test. And so after about
93
year seven, the simulated year seven, all the bench
94
trays, the aluminum bench trays literally started to fall apart.
95
So we ended up having to redesign the trays. We did
96
different welding, we change all our wheels. And then after
97
that, we then did the 20 year test. And the test
98
was perfect. And I remember thinking of all the things that I need
99
to worry about. This is not on that list. And so
100
when we got to build Farm 2, we built
101
the automated storage retrieval unit, went in, picked up all the trays
102
from the first tunnel. Perfect. Absolutely thrilled. This is just
103
great. No problems here. And then it moved along to the
104
next location. And then all of a sudden problems started to happen.
105
And it took us a long time to actually figure out what the problem was.
106
But essentially what had happened was that although the floor
107
of the corridor was flat, it wasn't flat,
108
flat, flat, flat. Which basically meant that because it's
109
a 14 meter high robot, which is about 3 meters wide,
110
okay, if you were plus 2 millimeters on one side and minus
111
2 millimeters on the other side. So like a tiny, tiny variance by
112
the time you got to the top of the system, the grabber arms,
113
which went out to grab the trays, were a fraction of a second
114
off center. And so you grab the tray and one
115
would grab slightly earlier, which would cause a twisting motion.
116
And so as you twisted it would rip the trays apart and we'd have,
117
you know, plants and substrate and water just sort of gushing down and falling
118
all over the place. And so yet again, it's one of these things which, you
119
know, you did the testing, you know, you were really happy about that.
120
So that was problems. We also had issues. No, we were building it during COVID
121
so we had issues, for example, on a lot of our computer
122
chips, which we needed, which were generally being used in the car
123
industry. And you may remember people weren't able to buy cars because none of these
124
chips were available. So we got hit by things like that as well. So what's
125
interesting about Farm2 is that it was very big, took a long time to sort
126
of actually identify the problems. And sometimes we had a problem
127
hiding behind another problem. So we think we had the problem and then we
128
fixed that problem. But we didn't realize there was actually another
129
problem hiding behind that. And so we thought we fixed this problem. This is all
130
great, but actually we discover nothing at the end. So anyway, we finally
131
figured out all the issues. We got great runtime uptime now
132
producing fantastic crop and no products
133
which are mainly short, leafy green things, salads and herbs out of farm
134
too are going to a lot of the food service industry.
135
So a lot of restaurants, pub chains, Michelin star
136
restaurants, like really, really high quality. And so, no, we're very, very
137
happy about what's going on there. But
138
we also came to the conclusion that building these very, very large
139
buildings had an inherent risk associated
140
with them. And the risk was that as we went on an international
141
basis, even if we use exactly the same
142
design, we would always go to a country and we'd use a
143
different main contractor, different
144
subcontractors, and they would all interpret what we had
145
chosen in our plans in a slightly different way. And it then became clear
146
that if you were slightly different, you could actually end up with projects which were
147
significantly over budget and delayed as a result of this. And so
148
by going back to the modular system, effectively what we've
149
got now is LEGO building blocks. And so we've got some building blocks
150
which are growing blocks. Some building blocks are welfare
151
units, some building blocks are irrigation blocks, some are corridor
152
blocks, some are blocks where we can put harvesting and seeding and
153
washing machines in there. And so we've got lots of different types of
154
these Lego building blocks which we can build in our factory.
155
So we can do the quality control, the quality assurance in the factory.
156
And because they are ISO international shipping organizations,
157
standard containers, we can send them anywhere in the world.
158
And so this becomes really interesting because we now have people who have
159
reached out to us and said, this is amazing, we're really interested in
160
this. And what we've discovered in this
161
process is that other vertical farm companies have
162
come to us and said, you know what? You are cheaper than what
163
we can build internally. Maybe we be using you
164
guys to actually do our expansion as well. And so that's becoming a
165
very, very interesting sort of market for us. Is actually working with other
166
vertical farm businesses and they essentially have the
167
benefit of an organization which knows what a really big farm is
168
and how you operate a really, really big vertical farm, but also
169
has gone through the learning curve of what to avoid
170
and what to actually do at a price point, which is
171
basically fantastic. That's an amazing update.
172
And it's such a dedication to quality and
173
a Commitment to ensuring that you're thinking long term about the
174
sustainability and the lasting impact of
175
your farm and all the moving parts that are required to make this work. And
176
so it's fascinating to hear how you were piecemealing all these different
177
scenarios and then understanding, you know, looking out that 20 year
178
window because obviously you're thinking about as people are using
179
your technology in your kit, you know, thinking
180
ahead, you know, to, and figuring out how much of an investment this is for
181
them on the upfront side, being conscious of, you know, looking
182
out for them. And I'm wondering, Tristan, where does this mindset or
183
this approach come? Is it an amalgamation of just like brain power
184
you have on the team, or is this just something like an
185
ethos that, you know, Fisher Farms carries. In
186
thinking through how you build things? I think the various things. So first of all,
187
I've spent 25 years in a whole range of different clean
188
energy technologies. So I've done a lot of solar farms,
189
including working on actually the construction of
190
a factory making solar panels. There's a
191
years and years ago when I was working with Shell Renewables, doing a joint
192
venture with Saint Gobain, building a solar factory, making
193
thin film solar panels. So I've gone from
194
literally making factories and how factories are designed to create these
195
modular systems in the solar side. Now I've done a lot of solar projects, a
196
lot of wind projects. In my previous company, lumicity, we built
197
179 biomass packaged plant rooms. And these biomass
198
package plant rooms are very similar footprint in size to our
199
grow modules that we have for Fisher Farms. You know, slightly more complicated than
200
what we have for Fisher Farms, but we built 179 of them in a six
201
month period of time. And that yet again, sort of got me used to sort
202
of looking at things from a modular basis. And what we saw out of that
203
was that the first package plant rooms we built were taking like
204
sort of five days to build, then four days to build and three days to
205
build. And eventually they took us about two days to build these units. As you
206
just got better and better at looking at these and becoming more efficient.
207
And the design which we have now allows
208
us to also go into other people's supply chains and really
209
on a global basis. So we don't just necessarily procure from the uk,
210
we actually can look at various items and say, okay, well who in the world
211
can actually provide us this item or that item a really good price point?
212
And so what's happening is that we can really see the cost
213
of these systems go down. And we think there's a lot of
214
scope for them to go down even further than where they are now.
215
And that's part of the getting on. The sort of the overall ethos of Fisher
216
Farms is that Fisher Farms wasn't set up
217
in order to grow salads and herbs, which is what
218
we're doing at the moment. So Fisher Farms was fundamentally created
219
to look at a problem that I was
220
increasingly conscious of from my clean energy and renewable energy space.
221
And so I was looking at climate change and how we can
222
have renewables and clean energy in order to combat climate change. And
223
then in my, you know, my biomass packaged plant room project, which I just mentioned,
224
179 of those that was providing heating systems to
225
the chicken and the turkey sector. And that got me looking
226
at food. And then as I saw the food crisis
227
emerging, which is more people, more middle class, a bigger demand,
228
but then less quality land becoming available because a lot of
229
urban developments which are taking place, some of the best farmlands in the world in
230
places like China and India have been taken over now with new
231
megacities. So you've got land scarcity issues,
232
but you also have problems associated with
233
water. So like 40% of all farms around the world have
234
water stress. 25% of all farms are around the
235
world use underground aquifer water, of which
236
all that water will probably be gone in about 20 years. So I can see
237
these really significant problems that
238
if they weren't solved, were bad on its own. But climate change
239
has made everything worse. And so Fisher Farms are set up to say,
240
okay, what can we do to develop a
241
technology which allows us to grow staple crops like
242
rice and wheat and then protein
243
crops like soy and peas? And so Fisher Farm was
244
designed for that. And so then the question is like, well, can
245
we today grow rice and wheat and soya peas at a price
246
point which is competitive to field grown crops? And the answer is no, not even
247
close. But you gotta start somewhere. And so our phase
248
one crops are, you know, the, what we're growing now, which are the sort of
249
short leafy greens, the salads, the herbs, the micro herb, microgreens.
250
We is sort of typical of most vertical farms. Our phase two crops are
251
fruity things. So, you know, we, and we started to go in that
252
market now. So we've got dwarf tomatoes and strawberries,
253
which we're doing research and development on getting our cost base. But then
254
fundamentally it's all about the final ones. And in order to be able to get
255
to that final one, there needs to Be dramatic cost reductions
256
in terms of the cost per meter squared for growing. The also
257
needs to be cost reductions in terms of the price of electricity, so more
258
renewables, more batteries. And then you also need to
259
have more efficiency in terms of your heating and ventilation and air conditioning
260
systems, your H Vac systems. And with all those things together, taking a little
261
bit here, a little bit there, you actually get to a point where you can
262
grow those products at a price point which is competitive with the
263
open crop. Still not today. I think that it's probably
264
15 years out, maybe slightly longer. But given the fact
265
that some of my early battery projects were
266
$10,000 a kilowatt hour and now are
267
$65 a kilowatt hour, so 10,000 to
268
65. And I've seen sort of enormous reductions in cost
269
for the wind projects and for solar projects. I think that if you
270
have certain design which is factory based, where you're actually building
271
these things in a factory at scale, you can get to do
272
some really interesting things. And so at Fisher Farms, we've hired people
273
who have factory experience. So we've got our two key guys
274
now running our technology factory come from the car industry, the
275
automobile industry, and they've actually built factories in addition to actually
276
running lines. So it's like, how do you have a design which is
277
really, really focused on delivering low cost? And I think
278
that's probably from a sort of mentality perspective,
279
quite different for Fisher farmers and many other players in the vertical farming
280
space who are very much looking at vertical farming as a premium
281
product. And they're talking about the great stuff that vertical farming does. And Vertical
282
farm produces high quality crops. They just do. They're
283
more nutritious, they've got longer shelf life, they got less air
284
miles to travel. So vertical farming deserves to
285
be a premium product. And a lot of companies
286
are putting branding around that to show that it's a great
287
product. But we're looking at a very different way. We're basically saying
288
if you're a premium product, you're always going to be a niche product
289
because nobody actually has that much money to spend on premium
290
products, premium anything. But they do have money to spend on
291
boring bulk base products of
292
whatever category it is. You know, so they're not that many, you know,
293
Bugattis which are sold. No, but there are, you know, a lot of,
294
you know, vws know which are sold. So, you know, you need to know what
295
it is. And so our view is that if we focus on really
296
driving down cost, cost, cost, cost,
297
then we don't have to worry about becoming a premium brand or anything
298
like that, but it gets us in the direction where we want to be, which
299
is how do you actually feed the world without trashing the planet
300
at the same time? And that fundamental ethos of what Fisher Farms is all
301
about. Yeah, I love that explanation. Thanks for sharing that.
302
You also understand you've been able to drive down the cost per
303
kilowatt hour as well. Can you talk a little bit about, about that exercise and
304
what that looks like for you now? Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting. So our.
305
We've had several generations now of our lights, so we developed our own
306
lights. We originally bought lights off the shelf from, you know, some of the big
307
suppliers out there. And, you know, they were great lights
308
and we're very happy with those lights, but they were always very, very expensive. And
309
so our lights now are probably 10% of
310
the cost of our original lights on in terms of capital cost.
311
And we've. So we've gone from 100 units, we're now down to about 10 units.
312
And we've also made big improvements in terms of our efficiency as well.
313
So if our efficiency was 100 units to start with, probably about 60
314
units now. So there's a nice big drop in terms of the efficiency that we've
315
got and also a significant improvement in terms of the capital
316
cost of those lights as well. And we're still seeing
317
improvements with our lights. We've also changed the type of lighting that we had. So
318
if you look at our very first farm, you know, the lights are very purple,
319
you know, which is like a lot of the players. And there was a view
320
that you didn't need the green in the lights. And we've actually introduced
321
some of that back in and out. So our lights look, you know,
322
more like natural light. They've still got, you know, more red and
323
blue and less green than actual
324
sunlight, but they look like a regular
325
whiteish light today. So that's been an interesting
326
change. So how does. When you look at the market and
327
how other people's expenses are, you know, maybe they're not doing the
328
same things that Fisher Farms is doing. How does it compare when you look
329
at costs and when people are considering the OPEX and Capex
330
costs for these, for running these farms, it seems like that's been a consideration of
331
yours from. Day one in the UK is a strange place to be
332
developing a vertical farm. And it's a strange place because our electricity
333
prices are really insanely high. The big change in pricing
334
really has happened over the last few years as well. So when we
335
Originally designed Farm2, our weighted
336
average price of electricity was supposed to be 10p a kilowatt hour, which
337
is slightly more expensive than what we were paying at Farm one at the
338
time. And that was a combination of buying from the grid and also
339
buying from Solar Farm. And
340
now at Farm2, we're paying 22p a kilowatt hour
341
rather than 10. And so the UK is very
342
expensive from an electricity perspective. And if you've got
343
something which is very, very expensive, it means you really, really need to work
344
hard to reduce the amount of that expensive thing that
345
you use. And I think that is an interesting one for us because I think
346
that we're probably more efficient than many other players out there in the market. You
347
don't have to worry so much about electricity because they're pricing
348
electricity is well less than half of what we have
349
to pay. So in the United States, you're around sort of 6 or 7
350
cents a kilowatt hour, which is significantly cheaper
351
than what we're paying in the uk. So I think efficiency, I think, is
352
something which has been important to us. And then clearly, you know, the capital cost
353
is something which we've already been. We talked about earlier, and where we are
354
on the capital cost in the meter squared is that we're
355
basically getting now to a point where we are
356
at the high end of a glass house cost.
357
And this is an interesting one for us because, you know, those, you
358
know, last year there was about $52 billion
359
of capital expenditure on glass houses. So that's a big
360
market. So for us to be able to actually now
361
be a. Have pricing, which is now sort of getting
362
into that zone, it's very, very interesting because it means that our
363
addressable market starts to shift. So it's not just
364
sort of short, leafy green things, but is also acting as a
365
nursery for other glass houses. So, you know,
366
if you are, you know, doing tomatoes or bell
367
peppers or aubergines, eggplants and
368
those kinds of products, cucumbers, they all start off as a baby
369
plant and then they get put out into a glasshouse and a
370
hydroponics glass house. And so we are now having
371
our pricing which is capable of actually being the
372
nursery for those areas. So we've had a number of good discussions
373
with that. We've had great discussions with people who
374
are growing trees. So saplings is another interesting area
375
for us as well. So it's. And we've also had discussions with people who are
376
growing salads in glass houses,
377
but they need a nursery room as well. So by having
378
a vertically farmed zone before it
379
goes into the main glass house, it means that the glass is much more
380
effectively used for growing large plants. And also
381
what happens in the glass house is highly
382
dependent on the quality of the plants which went into the glass house in the
383
first place. Yeah, makes sense. If you have plants which are grown in a
384
really great environment, then you can
385
get better yield in the actual glass house, whether it's for whatever plant you're
386
doing. So you can get more strawberries or more tomatoes or more
387
no cucumbers or more whatever in your glasshouse by actually
388
starting off on a good point. So that's been a very interesting additional sort of
389
area which we've been looking at in the market. So it's more
390
food linked. As I said before, we can see how
391
our price point for our capital cost per
392
meter squared will drop to a point where we'll be well within
393
the sort of the mid range of glasshouses in a relatively short period of
394
time. A lot of it's to do with economies of scale. So basically, the more
395
we do, the cheaper we can buy various different components
396
to make the overall project costs for ourselves and for our
397
customers cheaper as well. Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of that
398
hybridization approach of glasshouses partnering with vertical
399
farming. And I think the approach you just outlined makes a lot of sense when
400
you see what can you see. Leveraging the strengths of both sides efficiently, I
401
think is really the future of that partnership. And so it's exciting to see
402
progress there. Can you talk a little bit about Fisher Farms Technology,
403
how that was, you know what the intention there is. I know you're building up
404
the team. You recently announced the John Mayer joining as your
405
sales director as well. So talk a little about that project. Yeah. So Fisher
406
Farms Technology is based out of Birmingham,
407
near Birmingham Airport. And we have a dedicated facility there.
408
And essentially we have a number of different components to that system.
409
So we've got a core component is our trolley, and
410
on our trolley we have our watering system, we have our
411
lights, a lot of our electrics are on that. And then there are
412
eight trolleys which will then go into a modular shipping
413
container and then we have multiples of those. And so our
414
facility there allows us to assemble and
415
manufacture all the various different components which we need
416
for that system. And
417
we got the keys for the building in May this year.
418
And if you come around at some point, you can see
419
on the factory floor a whole range of containers which are in various different
420
parts of being pulled together. And
421
for our system, a lot of, you know, initially we're going to be, you know,
422
eating our own dog food. And so we are sending them out to Abu
423
Dhabi to be growing plants and products there, but
424
also then to other players out there on the market as well. So the
425
Fisher Farms technology has been great. And as you
426
pointed out, we brought in John Meyer, who was one
427
of the founders and key directors and head of the commercial director
428
at BOM Group, which is one of the largest and
429
most successful glass house manufacturers in the
430
world. And so it's been great to have his experience and it's also
431
been great to be able to know sense check, know where we are
432
in terms of pricing and the quality and the system like
433
that. So having somebody who actually has been doing that for years and
434
years and years who understands the industry inside
435
out, for him to go along to our system go, actually this is
436
worth getting out of retirement for. And he was super excited
437
about, you know, having access to another type of
438
technology, something complementary to where he has come
439
from. And. But it also means that, you know, when I'm
440
having discussions with people about pricing, things like that, I have a pretty good understanding
441
now of where we are relative to the market way, which if
442
you're not an insider, you won't necessarily know. So we now have some, you know,
443
inside knowledge on that, which has been great to have.
444
So where do you see the potential for growth with Fisher Forms technology
445
with, you know, what are the possibilities there? And have you thought out, you
446
know, what's that roadmap look like? So we have
447
a whole series of internal targets.
448
Those targets are. I'm not quite sure whether I've just
449
lost you. Yeah, still here. I'm just switching the camera
450
so you can continue. Yeah. So at Fisher Farms Technology, we have a
451
whole series of targets of how many units we would want to be able to
452
produce over the next few years. And, you know, so we know
453
where we want to go. You know, some of those units are going to be
454
for ourselves, for our own consumption. As I said, quite a lot of interest from
455
existing vertical farming businesses to actually see whether we can grow
456
on their behalf. And so we've got some good discussions going
457
there. And also, you know, looking at,
458
you know, various other different markets. So clearly we're in Abu Dhabi now and we
459
think that's an interesting market for us to grow in. And one of the reasons
460
why is because the cost electricity there is just crazy low
461
compared to what we're currently paying in the UK. So in the UK we
462
are at 22p a kilowatt hour. In Abu Dhabi we're at
463
1p a kilowatt hour for our electricity. So if you've got a
464
combination of, you know, being the cheapest large scale
465
vertical farm cost base in the world,
466
plus in terms of the capital cost, plus
467
really almost free electricity. No, that then starts
468
to create some very interesting opportunities. And
469
there's a really quite crazy, insane possibility
470
that the uae, which is a desert with almost no
471
water, could actually end up being a food exporter as a result
472
of this as well, which I think is super exciting for the
473
Emiratis to sort of have that sort of shift in mentality
474
from being a massive food importer to actually being able to
475
export some of the products to other European markets for
476
example as well. So a lot of the European market at the moment
477
is dominated by, you know,
478
imports which are air freighted during the winter months.
479
And so this is something, you know, yet again, which we could actually potentially
480
be participating in as well. Especially since, no,
481
the Emirates are a fantastic logistical hub.
482
And so with great airports and freight capacity
483
all around the world. So that becomes an interesting development for us as well.
484
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of promise in the UAE and especially
485
with the price per kilowatt hour at 1p, you know, it seems to open up
486
a lot of possibilities for partnerships there. Do you find the
487
timeline for getting projects off the ground there to be the
488
same? Longer, shorter? I know that, you know, I've had conversations
489
with other folks who've had projects in motion there that haven't
490
panned out and I don't know if it's the same across all the
491
UAE countries, but I'm, I'm curious what your experience has been.
492
So I think this is actually a really interesting point. One of the issues about
493
building a vertical farm normally is that it's a big
494
construction project and you. Which takes time to
495
design, takes time to implement, takes time to raise
496
the money to actually do it. And you've got to make sure
497
that you've got an off taker who actually wants to buy the product. So you
498
need to know what you're selling, what's the price that you're selling that product at
499
and what's the volume and what kind of contracts you're going to be able to
500
have. And because we have a modular system will
501
not stuck in the build a massive facility and
502
hope mentality that you get with big vertical farms which then
503
require lots of money to come from. So we're in a situation now where we
504
can start small, grow, delight
505
customers, and then they say, oh, wow, I want more. And then we can just
506
ship more units. And then they go, wow, this is great. And they say, how
507
much more capacity do you want? Well, we want another X number of tons per
508
week. Well, then we'll send more containers. And because we can build the
509
systems quite quickly, we actually can then send those
510
units in a way where our ability to grow
511
actually grows as our customer demand grows. And so we don't
512
get ahead of ourselves in terms of construction and therefore having a lot of
513
capital out the door for prolonged
514
periods of time. And now at some point, the ideal
515
scenario is for us to have negative working capital. And by what
516
I mean by that is that, you know, we should be able
517
to build our systems and pay our suppliers
518
after we actually get paid for the units which are going out the
519
door and actually start to generate revenue from them because we can build them so
520
quickly. So that becomes super interesting
521
in terms of expansion and it's great for all customers who use
522
our systems. So now we're in a sort of interesting situation in Abu Dhabi
523
now where, you know, we've got, you know, customers lined up for our
524
first system, which is out there, and we have other people who say, well,
525
once you've shown it and we like the product,
526
then we want to have stuff as well. And so that then allows you
527
to grow into that market rather
528
than having a big project. We're hoping that people come. And I think that's
529
basically where most of the vertical farming industry's been and they've had to be that
530
way because they'll looking at big buildings. And by not having a big building,
531
it just gives us the flexibility and it gives our customers the flexibility.
532
And we're also in a situation where we can offer
533
different types of solutions for people. So it could be that some people
534
say, you know what, just sell us Basel. And
535
other people will say, actually we want to buy
536
your units or rent your units and we will
537
own them. And. And then we'll just have a tolling arrangement in
538
place whereby either we'll grow it in your systems
539
or you can grow it for us, but we'll just do it at a fixed
540
price so you know where your revenues are and we can just choose what we
541
want to do in our system. So there's that kind of flexibility.
542
And it means now that we are able to
543
look at cooperating with most people, so we're
544
not looking at other vertical Farms and say, no, your competitor to us, we're
545
actually looking at the vertical farms and say, you are one of our customers, you
546
are one of our target markets. No, they benefit from the fact
547
that we're one of the largest vertical farms in the world. We've got more growing
548
experience than most people and we have a cheap system which they can
549
deploy and then they can gradually build up their
550
capacity. And also they can also go into different
551
markets quite quickly. So for example, if you're trying to now
552
you're in the US and you've currently got one
553
vertifarm or two vertical farms and you want to be able to expand into
554
many cities quite quickly, you can go with us and we can actually send
555
10 units, 10 grow containers to one city and then 10 to another
556
city, 10 to another city. And if you're not getting great results,
557
you just pick them up and move them to the place where you're actually getting
558
a better customer feedback. So instead of being stuck in a
559
location, you can just basically say, okay, clearly Seattle's not
560
working for us. Let's move from Seattle and San Diego,
561
here we come. And. Or you get to a situation where electricity
562
prices in California are going crazy high and say, okay, I'm going to
563
move over, over the border into Canada
564
and get no lower cost electricity there from
565
hydropower. So it's an interesting that flexibility
566
is something which is relatively unheard of in the industry.
567
It's pretty exciting. Yeah, it is very exciting. I love that approach, especially
568
like the plug and play opportunities you have and this
569
modular approach. And you wouldn't have the ability
570
if things hadn't been working out in a specific region to pick up a whole
571
factory and move it. Totally insane. Completely insane. Totally unheard of.
572
And you know, if you look at the US market, you know, there's a lot
573
of people who are doing sort of the micro green space. And you know,
574
microgreens are things we'd really want to be fast and close to the customer. You
575
don't want them to really be traveling any distance at all. And because they're so
576
efficient, you know, these are high margin sort of products. Having
577
multiple, no microgreen factories all
578
over the place near your target market is something which is very easy for us
579
to do, but you'd be pretty. And it's worth noting that
580
our cost structure scales really
581
nicely. So a lot of systems are very, very
582
expensive at small and then they get cheaper and cheaper. Cheaper, cheaper as you get
583
bigger. Well, we are actually cheap at small and medium and large.
584
Yeah. Because we're all modular. So it's like where there's one container or ten containers,
585
a hundred containers, it's still the container, and so it doesn't really matter. So
586
that scaling approach, where you don't have to build a really big
587
facility and just hope that you're going to get it filled, you can have a
588
much more nimble structure. And as I said, you know, you can build, you know,
589
you can go to 10 cities and have 10
590
containers each city and then realize that actually three of them are terrible
591
markets and just pull those containers out and reallocate them to
592
somewhere else. Very smart. And I'm sure that anyone who's
593
considering a new project would be keen on partnering with you,
594
especially in their conversations with investors in terms of, like, the investment
595
in equipment. And a lot of times, you know, the investors have that
596
as a big concern and understanding how they're going to recoup
597
their investment in the project. And I think speaking to it as a modular approach
598
that's flexible and can turn
599
on the conditions that are in that market, I think that's another selling point
600
for some of these projects to get off the ground. It's also worth noting that
601
when you're starting out for these kind of modular systems,
602
because each container is identical to the other container. Once you
603
know how to do it in one container, you know how to do it in
604
ten or a hundred or a thousand. And this is very different from
605
scaling of a big farm. So a big farm, you know, when you
606
go from 3,000 square meters where we were, to 25,000 square meters,
607
you know, the additional complexity about growing in a bigger space,
608
you're, you know, although you think everything is the same, they're not. Your
609
water hand, your water works differently, your substrate
610
interaction with the trays works differently, your lights work differently, and the
611
airflows work completely different. Your humidity, your temperature, all those things
612
quite different. Whereas in our system, you get it right with one container,
613
that's it, you're done. It's the same recipe, same everything for every other
614
container, which you do, because they're all exactly the same. And so
615
you don't have to, you know, one of the questions investors have is like, how
616
do you scale? How do you know that if I go from one size to
617
another size, you're not going to make a mistake? And with our system,
618
basically, I've proven it with one, and therefore it is exactly the same
619
for ten or one hundred or a thousand. And that is yet again,
620
the mindset is very similar to a Solar farm. So solar
621
farm, you know, starts off with a solar panel. Solar panel is
622
380 watts to 540 watts. You know, those are your
623
sort of ranges of the solar panels. Now that's. And there's a fixed size. And
624
if you put no, one of those, it's 340 watts
625
or 540 watts, whatever it is. And if you have 10 of them, it's
626
5,400 watts. You know, it's like, that's what it is. And you put them on
627
a different string and then have an array. And so there's some sort of interface
628
between them. But fundamentally, you know exactly what you're going to get. And that's the
629
same thing with our system. So if you know that one grow container
630
is 96 meters squared of growing space and has these
631
characteristics, then if you have, you know, 10
632
of them, you've got 960 meters squared of growing space,
633
109,600 meters of growing space. All of those things are
634
super scalable. And you learn once
635
and repeat rather than having to relearn every single time.
636
And yet again, you know, if I look at my experience in the wind
637
industry, you know, the wind industry scaled in
638
two different axes. So one was if you say, you
639
know, have a one megawatt wind turbine, you could go from a
640
one megawatt turbine and have ten one megawatt turbines to create a
641
ten megawatt farm, or you can go from a one megawatt turbine to a
642
ten megawatt turbine. Now, going from one megawatt to ten megawatt is
643
extraordinarily difficult. It was extraordinarily difficult to do
644
and highly risky. But going from 1 to 10 to get to 10 megawatts is
645
actually really, really well understood. And it's that kind of mindset that we
646
have at Fisher Farms. It's like using a design motif
647
that worked and got costs down dramatically
648
in the wind and the solar and the battery storage areas in particular,
649
I think, is very much what we're focused on in the organization.
650
I love that model. It's so interesting that it's modular. And from a
651
training perspective, like you said, once you've learned on one, you can learn in the
652
others. And I could see in the future as these farms start to get
653
rolled out and there's either consultants you work with or team members that
654
you work with. I could see almost like a Fisher Farms technology certified
655
person who's had experience with this and could sort of build a business around like,
656
hey, we, we know these farms. We've done them across the country. So if
657
you've got a project that's Fisher Farms tech related, then, you know, we could get
658
it up and running, you know, in a shorter period of time than having to
659
train people from scratch. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. We'll have to
660
copy that one. Thank you. Yeah, have someone be Fisher Farms
661
technology certified, you know, and that could be. Yeah, yeah, that's a great
662
idea. But it's also the other things we're thinking about is that you can add
663
the sort of the Fisher Farms inside. So we're very, very keen on it co
664
branding side. You know, it's like, no, if you are no X, you
665
know, Vertical Farm co. No. And it was like. And
666
then you got fish of arms on the inside and you could be really great
667
at your branding. And so, you know, this
668
basically says you don't have to be an expert in all domains,
669
you can be really, really good at branding, really good at
670
customers. In the same way that, you know, a farmer doesn't
671
actually have to build their own tractor, they don't have to build their own
672
combine harvester. You know, you're not expecting them to be fully vertically integrated,
673
they're just to do one part really, really well. And so I think a lot
674
of businesses who are fantastic,
675
amazing at branding, amazing at getting these done and so they
676
can focus on the part which they're really, really good at, and we can
677
focus on the part which we're good at, which is basically providing them a really,
678
really high value, low cost
679
system so they make more money and they don't have to worry about the technology
680
risk and they can just get on with all the stuff which they're good at
681
and making their customers totally delighted. I like that approach.
682
Speaking of certification, you were recently granted the BR CGS
683
certification as well. Yeah. So Fisher Farms, you know, in
684
the UK market there's a whole series of different certifications you need in order to
685
be able to sell food and stuff like that. And we have, you know, we
686
score extremely highly on that. And it's an interesting one
687
where the more I understand about the overall food
688
industry, the more I discover that the Fisher
689
Farm's quality and standard is so massively
690
greater than a regular field. And it sort of feels like an
691
obvious thing to say, but it's actually more shocking just
692
how good we are in terms of quality than the rest of the sort of
693
conventional land based systems are. So, no, we're very pleased about that.
694
And, you know, we've got a great team now, I think, and Fisher Farms has
695
been able, has been very lucky and that we've managed to attract and retain some
696
really, really great people within the organization. And, you know,
697
it's one of these things where, you know, they've done really great
698
things for the business. I imagine that changes the way retailers view
699
Fisher Farms as well. So retailers,
700
when we, yet again, when we were originally looking at this, you know, the retailers
701
I think gave us a pretty hard time about what they wanted and I think
702
they were almost like trying to raise the overall standard of everything and using
703
the way of actually driving that up. But no, I think retailers realize
704
now that, no, how we do things, how our processes
705
work are really, really great from a food
706
standard, food, food health, food safety perspective. Now we've done
707
a really good job. Congrats on the BBC interview. I saw that
708
as well. And yeah, I believe in the role of vertical farming in
709
the UK in terms of food security. So can you talk a little bit of
710
what that experience was like? Yeah, so, I mean, we've had quite a
711
few guys out there from there, ranging from, you know, the BBC a few times
712
now. Sky News has been around to us as well.
713
And it's always fun. And it's sort of one of these strange ones where I'll
714
sort of get a text message in the morning from
715
friends and say, oh, I heard you on Radio 4, which is the sort of
716
the go to news radio outlet here in the UK
717
for sort of talk and thoughtful inspection and stuff like that. So,
718
no, it's been really fun. It's been fun getting that. And I think it's great
719
for the team to actually also hear that people are
720
talking about Fisher Farms, not just in our own small community, but actually out
721
there in the real world as well. And, you know, but it is an
722
interesting story. No, and what Fisher Farms is doing and very much
723
is a sort of the future of food. And I think a lot of people
724
have opinions about things like this and so it
725
becomes topical as well. I think in one of past interviews,
726
One of the CEOs mentioned that I think because of the podcast or because
727
he was working on vertical farming, his kids now thought he was working on something
728
cool.
729
Yeah, well, you know, my kids are doing pretty cool stuff. I've got quite
730
a few kids and they're all doing some fun stuff as well.
731
So last time, Trishna, you spoke beautifully about creating a culture where bad
732
ideas combine into great ones. And I'm wondering how that
733
culture has scaled as your team and your global ambitions have
734
grown. Yeah, I mean it is always an interesting, it's a fascinating one. We now
735
have our sort of values that are plastered all over the wall
736
and things like that. And yet again, for sort of your listeners perspective,
737
those sort of four core values plus a fifth. So
738
we've got two soft values and one of them is
739
kindness. And so the idea is that let's just be kind to each other
740
and know what. And kindness doesn't have to be a massive thing.
741
It can be literally, you know, saying please and saying thank you and opening the
742
door and can I get you a cup of tea? And I think that one
743
thing which people forget is that, you know,
744
whilst we are colleagues and employees and workers
745
and all that kind of stuff, we are actually individual people who have
746
the life cycle of what it is to be a human being.
747
And so some of us will be having, you know, parents who may be dying
748
or problems with our spouses. You know, somebody might be getting divorced
749
or they have problems with their teenage kids or their young kids or they're
750
not sleeping because of the baby or whatever like that. And so I think it's
751
very important for us to acknowledge that we are much more
752
rounded individuals than you would than the person you see working with you.
753
And we have feelings and thoughts. And so just being kind to people
754
goes a long way. And it's surprising how not
755
kind a lot of people are, how rude they are or selfish
756
they are or they don't consider these kind of things. So kindness I think is
757
an important one. The other one we have is respect. And respect
758
isn't that you get respect because you
759
have no agency over that is like. But you respect other people and you
760
respect their time, you respect their effort and make sure that you
761
are, you know, if somebody says I had to have a deadline at
762
this particular moment, are you going to do anything with that information or are you
763
going to just sit on it for another few days, in which case maybe you
764
need to get that deadline as sharply, as quickly as you needed it. So kindness
765
and respect are the sort of the soft sides, but we also
766
have factfulness as one of the other, one of the hard ones. And fact
767
is just tell the truth as it really is.
768
And sometimes people aren't lying, but they're just,
769
they're putting things in a way which are where they'd like them to be. So
770
for example, you know, the number is five. Well, the number will
771
be five if certain things happen. But they're not five
772
now. They're actually Four now. And so. But if I'm counting on
773
you to tell me what's reality, I need to know that it's four now.
774
And you can tell me that if these things happen, it will be five. And
775
that's great. That's also factful. No, that's the part of the factfulness I need to
776
understand what's going on. But don't say it's five when it actually is four. And
777
so just being honest with ourselves, I think is really important.
778
The other one is robustness. So the idea is that
779
we can't always be nice. Yeah, we can't always be respectful.
780
Sometimes we get our numbers wrong. Sometimes people just
781
had a bad day. And what we don't want to do have is an organization
782
where people are running around on eggshells wondering, oh, what are they going to. If
783
I say something slightly wrong way now, how are they going to react to that?
784
So I think there's a level of just suck it up and be
785
robust. And so people can have and can have
786
conversations where they disagree with you and sometimes they'll disagree with you quite
787
strongly, hopefully in a kind way, hopefully in a respectful
788
way. But we can't actually always be that. And I think the key thing about
789
these values is that they're not where we are at. We're not like 10 out
790
of 10. And all these values, they're much more of a destination. These are a
791
journey which we all want. Everyone and some of us are going to be more
792
kind than others, some are going to be more factful than. Some of them are
793
more robust than others. But you just want to have those as a destination. And
794
the idea is that those four values then help the
795
fifth one, which is the critical one, which is the sort of the
796
innovation side, and what we are doing
797
is at the absolute cutting edge of technology.
798
And because of that, we don't actually know what we're doing.
799
And it sounds like a sort of crazy statement like, how can you say you
800
don't know what you're doing? But no, if we knew what we
801
were doing, we would have the answer already. I would today
802
be the lowest cost. I would be cheaper than a glass house today.
803
Yeah, that's what I would be. But I'm not, which means that I'm not there
804
yet, which means that I need to do things, which means that I need to
805
have an organization whereby people are putting ideas out
806
which they don't really know the answer to. And what we
807
want is my terrible idea and a genuinely bad idea.
808
And your crazy insane idea and somebody else's
809
drug addled idea or sleep addled idea, whatever it
810
is, and they're all actually genuinely bad
811
ideas independently. But by putting those
812
ideas together, layering those ideas on top, we come up with
813
a beautiful, brilliant insight which none of us independently
814
had thought about. And if we have a culture where we're rude to each
815
other or mean to each other, or we're lying to
816
each other, or we're flaky and we're worried about what people
817
will think, and you say something in a slightly weird way and then
818
I get really upset, then we're not going to put those ideas on the
819
table and we're never going to put the ideas on the table. And because if
820
you slap me down for my bad idea, I'll never give you
821
a good idea, I'll never give you any idea again because I'll be self
822
censoring on those ideas. And so by having a mentality where
823
it's like somebody has something and say, how do you build on this idea? I'm
824
not saying this is a great idea at all, but this is something which
825
we can build on. And we have found that, we found that a lot of
826
our great insights have come from just
827
adding to those ideas. And as a result of that, it's very difficult for
828
somebody to say that's my idea, because it's not. It's like I've taken
829
a little bit of that idea, I've taken a little bit of your idea, taken
830
a little bit of my idea, and we've added them together and create a new
831
idea. And so there's a much greater sense of ownership of the overall
832
collective idea because it's not really anybody's idea. In particular, some person might be the
833
person who said it, but they said it because
834
somebody else had promoted or thought about these things, or they've taken
835
four or five different other things together and to come up with the things. So
836
I think sort of the innovation think is good. You need to do
837
innovation in a safe way. And another way
838
of thinking about it is that if you're trying to find where the edge of
839
a cliff is in the fog, in the dark, you
840
don't go to a guy and say, walk in that direction. And when you scream,
841
I will know where the edge of the cliff is. What you want to do
842
is you want to tie them up with a rope, attach them to some
843
strong point and then you get them to walk off. And then they go, ah,
844
but now you know where the edge is and you just pull them back out.
845
And then they say, I've now found the edge. And then you walk off another
846
direction and you literally fall off the edge of the cliff. But then you get
847
pulled back in again. But the edge of the cliff is the
848
edge of knowledge. And if you basically are frightened
849
about getting to the edge of the cliff, you never go as far as you
850
could do as an organization. You never go like, okay, this is what the next
851
level is, because you're always frightened of failure. So
852
you've actually got go the edge, fail, and then get
853
pulled back. And now you know, this is a new. This is the new truth.
854
And as a result of that, you can come up with a cheaper, better, faster
855
way of doing things than you would have been able to before. But you're safe.
856
And so these core values, the kindness, respect, the
857
robustness, the factfulness, combined together create this
858
culture which allows us to do things, which is one, I think, one of the
859
reasons why we are the lowest cost vertical farm
860
in the world. I couldn't think of a better
861
bow to put on this conversation than to just
862
kind of summarize those amazing values. Very inspiring. And I'm sure any business
863
leader who's listening in any industry would be keen to kind of
864
follow that model. And it seems like you've built an environment and
865
a culture where everyone is supporting each other and pushing each other
866
and challenging each other. And I think that speaks volumes to where
867
you are today. So I really appreciate you coming back
868
on Tristan and sharing this, the journey, and it's so exciting to see
869
how much progress you've made and innovation you've made. And likely
870
due to all these values with Fisher Farms, I'm really grateful
871
for where this is headed for you. And this idea of the modular farms really
872
feels like it has a lot of momentum and I think will allow people to
873
play in the spaces where they excel, whether it's the marketing
874
side and just, you know, allowing you to bring in the expertise
875
on the production side. So lots of good things happening and I'm really grateful
876
for the update. Thank you very much and thank you for your time and keep
877
up the good work. And so we'll have all the links to contact
878
you and the team in the show notes and wishing the best success. What do
879
you have planned for conferences coming up? I've actually gone through a lot of
880
conferences the last few months, so I've been in Germany a few times, been
881
in the Netherlands a few times, Middle East a few times. So my next batch
882
is going to be probably sometime in January, though I have a bit of a
883
break at the moment. Okay. Yeah. Hopefully Anir or someone from the
884
team will get to connect with you as well. I appreciate your time. Excellent. Okay.
885
Good luck. Thank you very much.