S11E157 Mat Halter/TerraFerm - Transforming Beer Waste into Vertical Farm Gold

[00:00:00] Implementing Strategies to Optimize That System. They're using it during peak hours, they're using it sparingly, they're using it for a handful of hours per day. Because with indoor farming, temperature control HVAC systems, that air is circulating constantly. So if you're going to maintain a certain level, you're going to be pumping in a lot of carbon dioxide. So it would be a good strategy to optimize your usage, right? Use it when you best need it, when you can maximize its effect.

[00:00:26] So the advantage we have is, in theory, a never ending supply. So we can use carbon dioxide enrichment at whatever set point we want, high, low, medium, whatever, we can take it as high metabolically the plants will allow.

[00:00:47] Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast. Weekly conversations with fascinating CEOs, founders and ag tech visionaries. Join us every week as we dive deep into the world of vertical farming. With your host, Harry Duran. Vertical Farming Podcast, episode 154. Whoa, we're really making some progress here.

[00:01:08] Regular listeners to the show, welcome back. I appreciate all the help and support you provide for the show. Whether I meet you in person, virtually on socials, I appreciate everything you do to get the word out about this show. And if this is your first time listening, I'm positive you're in the right place, as this is the show where we interview fascinating CEOs and founders of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. I'm your host, Harry Duran, podcasting since 2014 with my first show, Podcast Junkies, and founder of Fullcast, our full service done for you podcast agency.

[00:01:35] Also now CEO of the AgTech Media Group. So I've got a full plate here. Stay tuned for all the insights and innovations coming from Sep and I at iGrownews.com. In case you missed the last episode, we spoke to Per Alisa. He's the CTO and co-founder of Elevate Farms and CEO of IntraVision Group. His journey from architect to innovator in CEA is truly inspiring. And his work with LED lighting systems and plant growth has led to groundbreaking developments in vertical farming and plant-made pharmaceuticals.

[00:02:02] I was fascinated to learn about Per's experiences working with space research institutes and his contributions to understanding plant growth in low atmospheric pressure environments. I'm learning so much from these episodes. We delve into the evolution of LED technology and its impact on plant cultivation, as well as the innovative gravity flow system used by Elevate Farms. Make sure you check that out if you have not done so already. This week, I connect with Jessica Naomi Fong. She's the founder and CEO of Common Farms.

[00:02:28] We connected at Indoor AgTech in Chicago last year, and she shares her inspiring story of launching a vertical farming business in Hong Kong just before the COVID pandemic hit. She's got a background in the restaurant industry and manufacturing, and she leveraged her unique perspective to create a thriving microgreens and specialty greens business in one of the world's most densely populated cities. I was particularly struck by Jessica's customer-centric approach to farming. She explains how she tailored her crop selection and growing methods to meet the specific needs of high-end chefs and restaurants in Hong Kong.

[00:02:57] She also discusses the importance of education in the vertical farming industry, both for her customers and for her own team. And her insights into the nutritional benefits of microgreens and her vision for making functional foods more accessible are really inspiring. This conversation offers valuable lessons for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, sustainable ag, and the future of food production. There's five key takeaways that really resonated with me. Number one, adaptability and resilience in business.

[00:03:21] Her journey with Common Farms highlights the importance of being adaptable, especially when starting a business during challenging times like COVID. Two, building strong customer relationships. Jessica emphasized the significance of cultivating these relationships with customers, particularly chefs and high-end restaurants. She understood their needs, and she collaborated on product development, which I found fascinating. Three, the approach of developing products based on direct feedback from the market and customers is crucial.

[00:03:46] And her strategy of growing specific crops requested by chefs and continuously iterating based on their feedback demonstrated the value of being market-driven and responsive to customers' needs. Four, the focus on educational outreach and transparency. Opening up the farm for visits and engaging with chefs and customers directly helps in educating them about the benefits of locally grown produce.

[00:04:06] Despite the challenges of operating in a space-constrained and competitive market like Hong Kong, Jessica leveraged local advantages by focusing on microgreens and specialty greens that can be grown efficiently in small spaces. You're really going to love this episode. There's a ton of great takeaways. Remember, I just have one ask for you. If you're listening and getting value from this, please share this episode with one friend who would get value from the content here. It's one of the best ways to grow the show.

[00:04:30] And remember, you can always visit verticalfarmingpodcast.com to read the full show notes for each episode, which includes all guest links as well. Okay, before we jump into this uninterrupted conversation with Jessica, a few words from the amazing partners that support this show. Don't miss the premier event of the year for everyone involved in greenhouse operations, controlled environment agriculture, and vertical farming. Indoor AgCon, now in its 12th year, heads to its new location at the Westgate, Las Vegas from March 11th to 12th, 2025.

[00:04:57] Join grower operators, investors, startups, tech leaders, academics, government officials, food service, retail suppliers, and more from across the USA and over 30 other countries. Explore an expanded expo floor filled with the latest product resources and business solutions and gain insights from top industry experts, including CEOs, growers, and investors at this full-scale educational conference. Plus, take advantage of invaluable networking opportunities.

[00:05:21] The team at Indoor AgCon has been generous enough to provide vertical farming podcast listeners with an additional 20% off of the full access conference passes. Just use promo code VFP at checkout. Visit indoor.ag and be part of the largest CEA industry gathering in Las Vegas in 2025. So Matt Halter, founder of TerraFirm. Thank you so much for joining me on Podcast Junkies. Yeah, thanks, Harry. I appreciate you having me. Where's home for you? I'm in San Diego.

[00:05:48] Just outside San Diego, technically, but I tend to just say San Diego because nobody knows where San Marcos is. So I'm in San Marcos, California. It's like 45 minutes outside San Diego. Born and raised? No. I'm originally from Tennessee. So I was born in North Carolina, but moved to Tennessee at a very early age and spent the first 34 years of my life there. Is there anything close to what you thought you might be when someone asked you what you're going to be when you grow up and resemble what it looks like now? No. No, no.

[00:06:18] I'm very far from it, even if you asked me 10 years ago. I've taken a very weird path and I had no way of seeing this coming. So walk us through, no need to go through the entire CV, but walk us through those early days and then we'll make our way to present day. Sure. Yeah. So like I said, grew up in East Tennessee and I went to college there at a medium-sized regional school in East Tennessee. And after that, went to grad school at University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

[00:06:45] I was pursuing plant science, plant biotechnology within a plant science department there. So I was working in biofuels at the time. This was like 2009, 2010. And I don't think anybody saw like the Teslas of the world coming at that time. So like the next big vehicle fuel in theory, the government was really putting all their money on like E85 ethanol-based fuels. So they were dumping a bunch of money into research for that all throughout the chain, upstream and downstream. They were working on developing ethanol feedstocks.

[00:07:14] Right now there's a bunch of ethanol that's produced mostly from corn though. They wanted to transition away from corn. If you're making tons of fuel, you don't want to be dipping into a food crop for that. So you're looking at alternatives. And I was working on switchgrass, just like a native, you know, big grass you might see growing on the side of the road if you're driving through the south or the Midwest. And we were working on a wide variety of problems associated with it from a biofuel perspective. You know, digestibility of the sugars in the cell walls was a big one. I was working on photosynthetic improvement.

[00:07:43] So I was working on creating a grass that grows more efficiently in the cold, photosynthesizes more efficiently in the cold, and see if you can extend the growing season earlier in the spring and later in the fall. So I wrapped that up in 2014 or so, somewhere around then. And I kind of took a big career turn. My, you know, traditionally my normal path would have been into big plant biotech, you know, the Monsantos of the world working on crop development and crop improvement.

[00:08:09] Kind of was burned out in plant biotech at the time and saw an opportunity locally in a industrial fermentation space. A commercialized company there was working on producing commodity chemicals, basically plastic monomers essentially from corn rather than from petroleum. They had a microorganism that would eat corn sugar, produce these monomer chemicals that could go on to be used to make fibers of all different sorts. So I was brought on for strain development and process development, process improvement in that space.

[00:08:38] And so I kind of was there for about six years and kind of became an engineer through training. Got into industrial fermentation through that avenue and brought out to San Diego eventually for a new opportunity. I'm out here again in fermentation process development. I've had a couple roles here since we've come out. We came out, like I said, in 2020, summer of 2020, COVID was raging. And I've been in a couple roles in fermentation cell culture process development since then. Where did the initial interest for plant science start?

[00:09:09] That's a good question. I mean, so I grew up on a farm in Tennessee. My dad was a, you know, he grew up on a farm in South Dakota. And when the family was moved to Tennessee, he bought a small farm and it wasn't really, you know, there wasn't, we weren't personally doing a lot of industrial agriculture on the farm, but we were basically renting out land space for like cattle and stuff. But we had a big personal garden. And, you know, when you're a kid, a large garden is a farm essentially.

[00:09:36] And so I grew up working in the garden and just from a very young age, I was super fascinated with agriculture and plants in general. And that's what led me into like pursuing the graduate degree that I did in plant science, plant biotech, agriculture. So, yeah, from a very early age, just fascinated with plants. And obviously, if you take it all the way to present day, do you think folks are starting to become more aware of where their food comes from?

[00:10:03] I mean, naturally, if you grow up on a farm, you get that firsthand experience with it. We're on like a slightly bigger plot of land than I'm used to because I grew up in the city and now I'm in Minnesota. So we tried our first pass at the garden last year. And it's just fascinating to see stuff that you literally plant as a tiny seed. And then you've got these like potatoes and we even tried corn. But it just changes like your perception. If you just grew up in the city, you just used to go in a supermarket and just assuming that's where food comes from. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[00:10:30] I mean, especially in the last couple of decades in particular, I mean, I guess you could go back to like the Internet, right? And that's when people really were able to take a deep dive into stuff like this. But more recently, I mean, when COVID hit, for instance, like everybody started gardening, right? Everybody started growing their own food. Of course, people were doing it before then and to a certain degree. It really exploded at that point in particular. And it's also fun. People are taking an interest in where their food comes from and that's important. That's a big deal. But it's also a hobby. It's also a lot of fun.

[00:11:00] What brought me to it in the first place? It wasn't necessarily, I don't garden strictly because I want to know where my food is from. I garden because I love seeing things grow. I think a lot of people probably relate to that same perspective. Yeah, for sure. Sure. And there's also something to be said about the work ethic of growing up on a farm because I've heard that consistently from some of the guests that have had that experience as well. Yeah, I mean, for sure. I can't say that I was exactly like, you know, pushing a plow at sunrise. That certainly wasn't my experience, but it was an exciting childhood.

[00:11:29] I will say that it was a lot of fun. So talk to me about what you knew or understood about the indoor farming space around the time that you were working in fermentation. Sure. Yeah. So I didn't know a lot, to be honest. So like I said, my graduate work was in switchgrass, you know, improvement. Switchgrass is, you know, not a crop. It's like corn. It's not a crop you can grow under glass, right?

[00:11:51] So if switchgrass were to have, in theory, made it as this big biofuel feedstock, it would be grown, you know, on farmland much like corn. But when you're working on it as, you know, a research and development subject, you're growing that in a greenhouse. You're not growing it out in the field. You eventually hopefully get to the field. But when you're working on it in a lab, everything's in a greenhouse or in a growth chamber or something like that. So I had experience working in greenhouses. You know, I was in a greenhouse every day for four years.

[00:12:20] I wasn't necessarily managing or operating that greenhouse, but I was working in it. That immediately gives me a certain degree, at least, of know-how of the space. But as far as like, you know, industrial agriculture indoors, really zero. I knew of it adjacently. But as far as experience, expertise, very little. When I started, you know, as I mentioned, my work in grad school was on photosynthesis, right? So I was working on improving cold temperature photosynthesis.

[00:12:48] So I immediately became, you know, intimately aware of the mechanisms underlying, you know, plant growth, photosynthesis in general, carbon capture. And so while switchgrass was never going to be grown indoors, I was aware of the strategies that indoor growers use to improve photosynthesis, carbon dioxide enrichment in particular. I understood how that mechanism worked. And so when I transitioned to fermentation, I was working at a very large scale industrial plant.

[00:13:15] Like I said, they had a commercialized process that they're using while we were also working on a smaller scale to improve that process, you know, work on strategies for that could scale to the manufacturing scale. You know, we were letting off a lot of carbon dioxide. It was, you know, hundreds of thousands of liters of fermentation material emitting carbon dioxide that had basically nonstop 24-7, 365. And that's, you know, it was probably about a year in that it kind of clicked on me.

[00:13:41] Like, wow, that's a huge waste for something that could be reused for an extremely unrelated industry, but could be tapped into. That was the initial ideation. Let's get into like your thought process and share like the origin story and how you came up with the concept for Terraform. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, like I said, I was thinking on it at work basically and figured, oh, wow, that could work. That's a cool idea. And just on my free time, I started out, my initial thought was obviously somebody's doing this. This is too obvious.

[00:14:10] It has to have been done or is being done. And so, started digging on the internet as thoroughly as possible, trying to find who is doing this where. And I couldn't find anything. So, I was a little bit blown away by that. So, at that point, I thought, okay, well, here, this looks like an opportunity. Started doing some design work on what I thought the system would look like. Started talking to some IP lawyers and stuff and bouncing ideas off them. You know, what's the feasibility of getting IP like this? Can you even do this?

[00:14:39] Because, you know, the system and the patent as it stands, there's nothing really new there. It's not, I didn't invent like a new technology. It's a bunch of stuff that exists all over the place that is just put into a unique, you know, sequence. So, I didn't know that it would be, you know, I didn't know it would be patentable. I didn't think that it would be until, you know, bouncing several design ideas off of a lawyer and them saying, yeah, you know, this has a chance. And so, filed like a, this was before forming the company or anything like that.

[00:15:07] And I wasn't planning on pursuing the company if I didn't get any IP behind it. And so, in 2018 or so, filed a provisional followed up by a full application. And then just basically sat on my hands. Like COVID hit. I mean, there was a point in Tennessee where I was actively, I had partnered up with a restaurateur in Knoxville. It was hoping to open up a new restaurant and brewery. And he thought the idea was cool. And we started working on a business plan to open up this restaurant and brewery.

[00:15:35] And, you know, I would operate a greenhouse adjacent to it. And it would basically be what Terra Firm looks like now, just a singular, you know, restaurant brewery. And we had a few meetings with folks who could bankroll it. And we didn't end up getting anywhere with them. And then literally, like, a couple months after our last meeting, COVID hit. And we were like, wow. You know, we dodged a massive bullet there. Thank goodness we were not successful. Because we would have been put out of business. You know, we would have opened our doors the day the world shut down.

[00:16:04] You know, that was a bit of a blessing in disguise, I guess. And so, again, at that time, got the job opportunity out west. Moved out here. And, again, just sitting on my hands waiting to find out about this patent. And I think, like, the patent lawyer was like, I don't even know. The patent lawyer was like, you definitely have a good shot. But I can't say. Like, sometimes when I help people with an application, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is a slam dunk. Like, there's no way this gets denied. And with mine, he was like, we'll see. And so, I didn't want to do anything. Yeah, just a question there.

[00:16:33] Did you have experience or did you know people that had experience successfully filing for patents? Because it's normally not something, you know, I think entrepreneurs, when they get started, but there's sometimes so much in go, go, go mode that they just want to get the idea concept validated. And they want to try to go to market as fast as possible. So, it's interesting that you started with the patent process. And I'm curious if there's some experience. You've had some experience with that. Yeah. So, I can't say that. I wish I could say that there was like a, you know, a meaningful strategy behind that.

[00:17:02] That I purposely decided to do it in that order. I can't say that's the case. I knew very little about, you know, strategic business decisions at that time. And so, I was really just doing what I thought naturally was the next step. And that happened to be filing for that patent before pursuing anything else. I didn't think that it was, you know, if it wasn't protectable, then I didn't think that I had the, you know, the machine behind me to do anything with it. If somebody could just turn around and do it themselves.

[00:17:29] So, I thought it was a natural first choice, you know, first step. And so, that's just the way it happened. There wasn't any design behind that. So, got out to San Diego and eventually found out that the patent was going to be accepted. Which was, you know, very cool. Celebrated that. And then immediately was kind of hit by like, oh no, now I have to do this thing. A prototype. Just like, you know, a couple circuit boards. I didn't build it personally. A good friend of mine who's an electrical engineer who knows how to do these things built it for me.

[00:17:57] Like, built a prototype capable of controlling a three-way valve basically. It was just like a little CO2 sensor. You can enter in a set point. And, you know, when CO2 concentrations are above that set point, it tells the valve one thing. When they're below that set point, it tells the valve another thing. And so, you know, I wanted to demonstrate it. Because this gets back to what I was originally saying. Why hasn't this been done yet? You know, this, again, this question keeps like popping up in my mind. Like, this seems so obvious.

[00:18:24] And even if you go into the scientific literature on carbon dioxide enrichment, you'll find reviews online. Multiple reviews online that list out all these different strategies for doing it. You know, comparing and contrasting them. And fermentation off gas is mentioned in a couple of them. And so, of course, I dug into those deeply to see where they led. And they didn't lead anywhere. They didn't cite anybody who's doing it. They just said, this is a cool resource. This would be a good spot to get your CO2. They didn't actually cite anybody actually doing it.

[00:18:53] So, I have this question sitting in the back of my head. Why isn't anybody doing this? Maybe there's something I'm not aware of. Maybe there's a major reason nobody's doing this. When you're tapping into, like, I don't know if you homebrew or if anybody listening homebrews, but if you do, you know, you might be familiar with the smell of your garage when you walk into like an active fermentation, right? You know, it just, it smells like hops. It smells like beer. Which would imply that it's not just carbon dioxide coming off that fermentation, right? There's a lot of other stuff in there.

[00:19:22] Plant metabolites are coming off that fermentation. That was a big thought. Like, maybe this is why. Maybe if you can't scrub that gas well enough, you know, remove everything of all these VOCs. Maybe they mess with the plants somehow. Just one of many big questions that I wanted to address before pursuing it further. Like, okay, so now the IP is wrapped up. Now the next stage is just demonstrated. See if it works.

[00:19:45] So, that was about a couple years ago now that I started to pursue building out the prototype and bought a couple growth chambers, just like off-the-shelf growth chambers. And we used one as a control, just didn't do anything to it, and used the other one as a treatment. Piped in a fermentation system and did a bunch of homebrewing for like two months in a row. Every four days made a batch of like a one-gallon batch of beer, the exact same batch of beer. Did you have experience in homebrewing? Yeah, I mean, I dabbled for a long time.

[00:20:13] Like, you know, I started homebrewing, you know, when I was younger. And I had since stopped just because it's a, you know, it was a lot of fun when I was 23, right? But it's a big mess now. So, I had a lot of experience homebrewing, but I had not done it for quite a while when I started this project. But it was nice to get back into that as well. Dumped a lot of beer. You know, if I'm brewing a gallon once every four days, that's, I can't keep up with that. So, I was dumping a lot of beer. You're having a lot of beer parties, sir? No, no. It was all for the experiment.

[00:20:44] Dumped a lot of it. Yeah, yeah. The first test I did was in spinach. And I chose spinach because, you know, obviously it's a common table vegetable, green, leafy green, and common product in the vertical farming space. And most importantly, it's easy to grow and it was small. Like, the chambers I bought were not these large industrial chambers you might see at like an R&D facility. They're chambers you're meant to grow things at home with. Spinach was just easy and practical to work with. So, I ran the trials on spinach.

[00:21:12] Which, after like 10 days, it was evident that there was a massive effect. Like, I could see them. I could see the treatment chamber running away from the control chamber, which is cool to see. You know, after 50 days, it was stark. And the data analysis, I think, shows that. I published the results of the trial recently and just about exactly a month ago now. So, those are available out in a peer-reviewed journal online. And the data is fantastic. It looked great. We got an 89% increase in yield across treatment and control chamber. Wow.

[00:21:42] And, you know, any yield improvement program is going to be looking for single-digit yield improvement, right? And so, to get into the 89 realm, and even if you look at the published data on carbon dioxide enrichment, there's a lot of academic and industrial data that's available online. For spinach, specifically, I haven't seen anything that high before. So, that was great. It was good to see it. And it kind of boosted my efforts in really ramping things up to get this commercialized and get it out there.

[00:22:12] So, you're at that point where you see that stark improvement versus the test. How do you think about deciding where you go from there? Because it's obviously, you know, it's proving what you want to prove, your hypothesis. And I'm just curious now, you know, you're wearing so many hats because you've got on your researcher hat, but you've also got on your entrepreneur hat. And you're trying to figure out, like, what's the appropriate next step? So, just walk me through that thought process. Yeah, that's a tough question. Because again, at this point, I'm a first-time founder. I had never founded a business before.

[00:22:41] So, I had been and still am learning everything, you know, doing everything for the first time. This kind of gets back to your question earlier about, you know, why did I decide to go after the patent first instead of doing something else first? And it's like, well, that was just the first thing I thought of. So, I'm learning a lot of things, you know, and certainly about founding a business, a lot of things I would have done differently. Like, if you had asked me this question two years ago, there's a lot of things I've done since then that I would have done differently. And I'm sure if you ask me that question two years from now, I will say the same thing.

[00:23:08] Like, yeah, I wish right after that podcast, I wish I had done this completely differently. Yeah. But learning a lot of things the hard way, it's fine. It slows the process down. But ultimately, you know, you do get it done. And so, take us into like present day, you know, where are you now and how are things developing? Yeah. So, right now, you know, TerraFirm exists on paper right now. I'm a pre-seed company. So, what I'm trying to do right now is raise money for a pilot.

[00:23:34] Actively looking for a brewery partner here in the San Diego area that I'd like to put a modular farm on their space. Like a freight farm style farm on their, in the back lot behind their building or in a side parking lot or something. And, you know, tap into their fermentation waste gas and do a pilot for a couple of years.

[00:23:53] And, you know, basically to just validate that there's a market for this, but also to show the entire success of this business model in general relies heavily on partnerships with breweries, right? You know, carbon dioxide isn't new. Every vertical farm out there, I would imagine, is doing it. The advantage that our business has is, you know, the elimination of overhead. It's not a huge overhead associated with carbon dioxide enrichment. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to claim that it is.

[00:24:20] But certainly those who are, let's say, using bottled carbon dioxide, you know, they have a big tank on the side of their building and they're pumping it in whenever they need to be. They're implementing strategies to optimize that system. You know, they're using it during peak hours. They're using it sparingly. They're using it for a handful of hours per day. Because with indoor farming, temperature control HVAC systems, like that air is circulating constantly. So, if you're going to maintain a certain level, you're going to be pumping in a lot of carbon dioxide.

[00:24:47] So, it would be a good strategy to optimize your usage, right? Use it when you best need it, when you can maximize its effect. So, the advantage we have is, in theory, a never-ending supply. So, we can use carbon dioxide enrichment at whatever set point we want, high, low, medium, whatever. We can take it as high metabolically the plants will allow, which again might be a limiting factor for those who are paying for it.

[00:25:15] We can take it as high as we want whenever we want, for as long as we want. But in order to do so, we're going to need breweries who are willing to partner with us. That's really where the big risk factor for this business model is getting these people to allow us to partner with them. So, the way I envision the pilot working is going after funding for a two-year runway that allows me to drop a modular farm on a space and obviously move crops to a market. But more importantly, measure the effect that we're having on the breweries marketability.

[00:25:45] A big pitch we'll be making to breweries is, there's a bunch of survey data out there, a bunch of published data that you can easily find with Google that says that beer drinkers, beer consumers are willing to pay a premium for a sustainable product. So, if you're able to tell your customers that you're actively doing something to cut your carbon footprint, your CO2 rather than being emitted to the air is actually going towards something tangible that you can literally taste while you're there. Are they going to spend more money? Are they going to come back more?

[00:26:12] So, a big metric to be measured for that pilot is the impact on the brewery, not just the impact on crops. Obviously, that will be measured closely as well. But the pilot will be used to, most importantly, measure our marketability to other partners. And then ultimately, that'll lead to the ability to pursue further funding for expansion, probably early on, probably more in the modular area.

[00:26:44] Yeah. In a non-modular fashion. Yeah, there's so many variables I guess you'd want to measure, especially like, have you gotten to the point where you can see different results with different crops? Yeah, for sure. The paper that's out right now is, it just focuses on the spinach results that I had. I've done it with a number of different crops and I've gotten good results with all of them, but a wide variety of results with all of them. And that can be expected, right? I use the same set point, for instance. That's something I haven't varied. All crops don't work best at the same set points.

[00:27:13] That's very well known and established. That's a variable that I haven't tweaked right there. But certainly for, there's a lot of work to do to optimize the system. I would love to do that work. But right now I'm just pitching, you know, getting it out there. Yeah, and it obviously comes, as you alluded to, it comes with its own set of challenges because there's all the technology involved in capturing the fermentation and then getting it to have success in the farm itself.

[00:27:38] But then, you know, you get to that point where you do have your crops and now you've got to get into the marketing and you've got to figure out, you know, how you're going to actually sell what you're growing. So in terms of all the other challenges normal farms have, it's like you definitely have this extra layer. That kind of gets back to another question you asked earlier, you know, regarding my experience in the vertical or indoor growing space. And my answer was not a lot, right?

[00:28:04] So another important thing I'm pursuing right now is building out a team that can help me do that. I'm definitely hoping to, when it comes time to start approaching VCs or approaching early funding sources, whatever it may look like, I'm hoping to have a team with me that can tackle or not just tackle because it'll be a team effort, but that can bring experience in produce marketing and sales as well as indoor farm operations to the table. That's another huge task that I'm taking care of right now. Yeah.

[00:28:34] And I imagine there's a lot of things that you're thinking about. One of the questions I like to ask, and this is for folks that have established farms and been doing this for a while, but I'm curious, your answer might be different. What's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently? Yeah, sure. The toughest question I've had to ask myself recently is what am I missing? And I kind of touched on that earlier, but I don't necessarily mean it just from a technical standpoint. I talked earlier about, you know, about my thoughts about why haven't people done this yet?

[00:29:02] So there is that, but also what am I missing from the business perspective? Again, I am a first time founder. I'm a first time, you know, this is the first business I've started. What don't I know? You know, I don't know what I don't know. It's a constant battle to learn more about strategies for starting a business, for seeking funding. What are investors looking for? This is a world that I have really no official training in. So I'm learning all this on the side. It's been a big learning experience.

[00:29:30] You know, I've got a friend here in San Diego who is, he's been involved with a couple of successful startup, VC backed startups, totally different industry, but, you know, essentially the same at the backbone. I was talking with him sometime last year about my pitch deck and just, you know, tapping him as a resource for how can I do this better? What am I doing wrong? And we were going through my pitch deck actually, and I was going through slide for slide.

[00:29:53] And I wasn't necessarily giving him like the straight up pitch, but I was giving him the gist of what each slide is meant to communicate and what I'm going to be saying and so on and so forth. And I got to a particularly business heavy slide that I had put together that, you know, it became clear that I was like, I pumped the brakes when I started talking about this one. And I was a little bit self-conscious and I kind of, it was clear I wasn't speaking confidently. And I noticed that I kind of stopped and I was like, okay, I got to be honest, like I'm a super technical guy. I don't know a lot about this one.

[00:30:21] I did my best to put the slide together, but I obviously I need to know this. I'm a technical person, not a business guy. And he stopped me abruptly and said, you need to never say that again. Let me stop you right there. He was, he said something along the lines of, if you come to me and ask for a ridiculous amount of money and then say, but I don't really know what I'm going to do with it. I'm not going to write you a check. Right. He was like, why would you even consider that?

[00:30:44] He was like, you need to, you know, it was obviously I wasn't pitching to him, but he was like, you need to go back and start over and really get to the point where you don't feel in the back of your head. You know, you don't feel like saying this isn't my expertise when you're doing this. And so that was good. I mean, it was like, you know, he caught me off guard and he gave me a good lesson, but it's probably the best lesson I've gotten in this process to date.

[00:31:08] And so that kind of spurred me into spending a lot of time, you know, learning the ins and outs of what I'm asking people to give me money for. That was super helpful, but that continues to be a tough question that I'm asking myself constantly. What am I missing? What am I not doing that I need to be doing and how can I find that out? Yeah, it's very interesting because I've been an entrepreneur for 10 years and it's like, there's a lot of things that you take for granted when you're working in a corporate job.

[00:31:38] There's stuff that's just taken care of, like investment and finance and payroll and all like marketing and sales and like administration and like, you know, ordering supplies, like all this stuff. When you realize that you're, yeah, yeah. When you realize you got to, you're the buck stops with you. It's very sobering, but it's empowering as well. And, you know, there's been hiccups in my entrepreneurial journey, definitely over the years and some lessons learned from dealing with the IRS.

[00:32:07] But, you know, I think, but it really drives that point home of understanding where you do have gaps in either seeking out mentors or just doubling down and just figuring out like, okay, I got to open up the, I got to hit YouTube or I got to, you know, figure out where the course is. That's going to get me like the 80% there so I can start to speak intelligently about all these things. Yeah. And that's another reason why it's so important to build out a fantastic team, right?

[00:32:30] So that you can trust because, you know, I know myself well enough to know that, you know, I'm going to be, let's say, hypothetically, I land seed funding and I'm able to pilot this thing sometime in, let's say a year from now. I know that I'm going to be a pain about the ins and outs and the little things with the goings on of the operations. I know that I'm going to be, but I also know that I need to do a lot of other things. And so I need to know that I have somebody that I trust to take care of that so I don't have to stress about it.

[00:32:58] That comes back to how important it is right now to build out the team that I'm looking for just to take that off the plate and not have to worry about those things because there are so many other things that I have to be worried about. So how do you think about tackling a problem like that? I've had this conversation with first-time CEOs as well. Like, where do you look to for guidance? Are there mentors in terms of the thought process for how you start to build a world-class team around you that can support you in the things that are their genius?

[00:33:27] I can't say I have any direct mentorship on that topic as of right now. I would love to have some. But my main resource right now is like, you know, I listen to a lot of podcasts on starting companies. This Vertical Farming podcast, for instance, has been a great resource. Many others as well. I listen to a lot of founders' podcasts that touch on a lot of these things, and they're certainly helpful. Everything I hear at this point is helpful. So the internet's a great resource just in general.

[00:33:54] I don't have any direct mentorship on this. Yeah, I mean, I think really the guidance there and some of the feedback that I've heard from past guests is just really, they tell you to hire, what is it? Like hire slow, fire fast. I haven't heard that one yet, but hopefully not the case. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the point there was really take the time to figure out if you have a shared mission with these people. Yeah, sure. And, you know, make a change fast if it becomes obvious that that's not the case.

[00:34:24] Yeah. Have you had much experience or have engaged with the controlled environment industry or the vertical farming world? Not directly. Beyond, you know, spending countless hours on industry websites and industry podcasts. I am hoping this year to get to a couple conferences, still trying to work out logistics on that. I've got a nine-month-old trying to figure out how to juggle that. But yeah, not directly, but hoping to change that soon. Things have really ramped up for the business in the last six months, let's say.

[00:34:52] It's been a very slow trickle leading to that six-month period. And then in the last six months, it's kind of been full tilt. And so that is on my goal list for 2025 is to start, you know, kind of getting my feet into the industry a bit better than I have in the past. Getting to know people and getting to know organizations a bit better. So given the audience for this show, is there any expertise or connections or potential partners that you're sort of eyeing for this next, you know, next 12-month cycle? Yeah, for sure.

[00:35:22] So I have touched base with freight farms, for instance, just kind of trying to build out an idea of what this pilot's going to look like. I had conversations with them about, you know, can we engineer your modular farms for this system? And it's a pretty straightforward, you know, just doing some extra plumbing on the system. But I have been using them as a resource to kind of build out my strategy for this pilot. Of course, there are many other like them and many other resources within the industry that may be applicable as well.

[00:35:50] Right now, my biggest next hurdle is really locking down a brewery partner. I've got an article coming out, like kind of a Q&A style article coming out for a San Diego brewing publication in about a week and a half or two weeks that I'm hoping to kind of ride into some partnership discussions with a couple of the local breweries here in town. San Diego is a great place to be for beer. You know, I came from East Tennessee. We were in Knoxville.

[00:36:15] When I was in Knoxville, we were like two hours away from Asheville, North Carolina, which is, you know, the East Coast brewing capital of the country, in my opinion. And San Diego is very much the West Coast. So there's a lot of small to medium range breweries out here. Very high density.

[00:36:30] I'm hoping that I'll be able to, you know, I'm hoping to make contact with a couple of them and eventually come out with one that really shares, you know, sees the vision that I have for this and wants to come along and is excited by it and thinks that they have a customer base that will appreciate it and enjoy it as well. You know, you don't often see the pairing of beer and salads. You know, there's probably like a marketing play there where, you know, there's been stranger combinations that have been made and have had success.

[00:36:58] So I think if you've got the right marketing person, it gets pretty creative. I think there's... Yeah, I mean, so the way I'm approaching it right now would be, you know, not necessarily to be selling out of the brewery because you just couldn't move enough product with that model. But by all means, like, you know, if I could find a brewery partner that wants to put up a fridge behind the counter, right, and here's your pint and here's your head of lettuce, like that would be awesome. You know, we're hoping to do like a farmer's market style pop up on like Saturday mornings at the brewery, which will bring people to the brewery.

[00:37:28] There's definitely a dynamic that can be fostered. You know, especially like craft beer drinkers, they tend to be foodies in general, right? So your average, like West Coast IPA connoisseur is also going to be down for locally grown produce like that. They just go hand in hand. So hoping to really lean into that dynamic and kind of find a resonance in that market. Well, I appreciate you reaching out because it's hard to keep up with everything that's happening in the industry, but it's always exciting to see new innovations.

[00:37:56] And I think this has definitely got some legs and you've got your work cut out for you, obviously, as a first time entrepreneur and first time CEO. But I think the path that you took was really interesting to get that patent first to and then to start to find the partners that would make sense for this. So it feels like things are moving in the right direction. And sometimes it's hard to look at progress when you look back all the way at like 2017, 18, when you first had this idea. We're at 2025 now. So I think there's something to be said for tenacity and persistence.

[00:38:26] Yeah, it's been a long and slow road. Like a lot of that time was literally just waiting to see if things were going to happen. And it's been a long time coming. And so I'm excited that it's like I said, the last six months have really been busy. And I feel like there's a lot of momentum right now for the first time since I started. It was always very much like a weird idea that maybe I could pursue up until like August when things really started moving. Now it's like, OK, this is a business. This is something that I can actually make happen.

[00:38:55] So I'm hoping to ride that momentum for sure. Yeah. And I think the more you start to speak to folks in the industry, you know, and getting to events like Indoor AdCon, which I'll be at in March as well. I think it's the third or fourth time there. But I think getting some visibility into the dynamics around operating and running a farm in itself. And then because that's, you know, 50 percent of the business model. So I think the more you start to talk about folks and all just kind of like now that you've got the patent filed, you can start to kind of, you know, pick people's brains about the idea.

[00:39:24] And I think being in the environment, I think will start to help and probably foster some other ideas for possible collaborations. For sure. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's terra-firm.com. Anywhere else you want to send folks? Want to learn more? You'll find everything on that website. You know, it links us to the socials.

[00:39:43] There's a press release on there that links to the peer-reviewed article that's out that, you know, shows the data set we talked about earlier and really lays out in fine detail the process flow diagram and how everything works. The website should do it. Yeah. Anybody would be able to find anything they want on there. Okay. Yeah, Matt, we'll make sure that all those links and everything you provided is going to be in the show notes. But I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. Thank you, Harry. I really appreciate the time. is our burada is approximately limited time- of sentiment, whom it is alreadyươbs, or the first ever narrative. And therefore we look forward to troubling times. Google我們 you